Over the past few weeks the search marketing industry has been buzzing by the news that Google now prefers brands, giving big brand sites an extra boost in ranking. The changes took effect in the recent “Vince’s” Google Algorithm update.

Matt Cutts, head of Googles Webspam team, recorded the following Youtube video for Googles webmasters Central channel explaining exactly how the changes will effect search results.

Matt Cutts stated that the “simple change” is not so much about brands, but about elements that go into a brand, including “trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, high quality.”

“I don’t think of it as putting more weight on brands. We really don’t think about ‘brands’ in Search Quality that much,” says Matt “It’s not that we try to always return brands. We try to return whatever we think the best results are for users.”

“The net upshot of this change is pretty simple. We try to return high-quality results, we think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, PageRank. And so, what you should be doing doesn’t change: try to make a great site. Try to make it a site that is so fantastic that you become known as an authority in your niche,” Cutts said. “And it doesn’t have to be a big niche. It doesn’t have to be a huge, well known keyword. It can be a smaller niche, and if you’re still the expert, that’s the sort of thing that people are going to want to link to, that they’ll talk about, the sort of thing people really enjoy. Those are the sorts of sites, the experts, that we want to bring back.”