Google to recommend brands on relevant searches – Bad news for the SEO industry

Google have recently announced an update to the part of the site that showed similar searches to the one that was being searched by the user.

The announcement stated that Google are now testing brand recommendations on the Google search engine meaning that they will be recommending specific brands on relevant searches.

Say for example you were to search for ‘digital cameras’ Google will now show a bar at the very top of the search results displaying recommended brands for digital cameras such as Canon, Sony and Nikon etc.

Google have been quite coy on exactly what their plans are:

“As before, on questions about testing and this design, this is just a test and at this point we don’t have more to share. But, please do stay tuned. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop about any new developments.”

The announcement is bad news for small companies that rely on their decent rankings for hot keywords on Google search.

It seems a tad unfair that users will now get to see bigger brands at the top highlighted under recommendations as it now more likely that users will click on these links as they may be more well known and in a more prominent position than the sites that are actually ranked in those top 10 positions.

This news will surely not be received well by people in the search engine market.

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