If you do some research on implied links, you’ll read several opinions stating that implied links pass juice. We read an article that went as far as saying that implied links and express links carry the same weight in the algorithm. This is a bold claim.
Do brand links as implied links affect rank? We put this to the test.
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Transcription Below
When you look at the future of SEO and you theorize where things are going, brand mentions are a hot topic right now, specifically looking at the idea of you do not need backlinks coming to your site and you just need mentions of your site and Google will treat those as backlinks and understand what they are. It will give you a boost and build your brand. We hear a lot of those concepts.
We put 20,000 brand mentions out for one of our test pages. We basically had two fake keywords set up. The idea of all these pages have one fake keyword and then the other fake keyword that was different on each pages would be the brand. Each page had a different brand. Then without hyperlinking, we brand the target page which was the middle page of the 5 test pages that we had.
We placed the brand and the product across the web. It did not move the needle a bit. I checked this morning to recheck – still nothing. Just having the text out there across many pages did not influence the ranking at all. Brand mentions are important but they still need to be hyperlinked in order to get the benefit of that mention.