What Are Brand Mentions
Brand mentions are references to a business, brand, or service online. These mentions usually happen in product or service reviews, blogs, educational content, and news reports. Brand mentions can directly affect the online reputation of a product or a brand. There are many outreaching techniques to convert these unlinked mentions into a powerful backlink.
This is one of the most intriguing questions asked by many. Does Google treat unlinked mentions like links? Do these mentions offer benefits?
It’s Either a Link, or It’s Not
Mueller answered the question by saying that a brand mention is not equivalent to a link. So Google won’t treat these mentions like a link.
John Mueller answered:
” First of all, if there’s no link to your web pages, it’s not a link there. So it’s not something that we would notice, like – oh, it’s a half-link worth of mention or something similar.
There is no link, so there is no signal passing as it would be with any normal link. This doesn’t mean that these mentions are bad or that you need to avoid them.
It’s just that Google doesn’t treat these as links. And that’s about it. Maybe users will pick that mention, search for your website, and visit your site anyway.
But it’s not a link to your website. So from that point of view, it’s very different Google, and wouldn’t put them into the similar category.”
