Does Google Treat Unlinked Mentions Like Links?
Googles John Mueller related the situation of articles talking about his site but that the mentions of the brand name or domain name were not linked to his site. He was asked if mentions of his domain and brand name could pass some sort of signal.
Mueller answered the question by essentially stating that a brand mention is not a link so it won’t be treated like a link.
“I mean… First of all, if there’s no link to your pages then it’s not really a link there.
So it’s not something that we would see, kind of like, oh it’s a half link worth of mention or something like that.
It’s essentially, there is no link, so there is no signal passing like there would be with any normal link there.
So that’s, I think kind of, the first thing to keep in mind.
That doesn’t mean that… kind of… these mentions are bad or that you need to avoid them or anything like that.
It’s really just, we don’t treat these as links.
And that’s about it.
And it’s something where maybe users will pick that mention and they will search for your site and they go to your site anyway.
But it’s not a link to your site.
So from that point of view, it’s very different.
I wouldn’t put them into the same category.”
He was very clear that if a site mentions a brand or website domain that Google will not treat that as a link.
“It’s essentially, there is no link, so there is no signal passing…”
That means if there is no signal passing then it has zero ranking influence similar to a link.
