Google Search: When A Brand Becomes More Popular Than The Meaning Of The Word

Sep 30, 2022 - 7:31 am 3 by

Google Search Brand

There are some brands that have generic names that have become more popular than the actual meaning of the word. In those cases, Google Search may rank or show information about the brand over the meaning of the word.

Google may have done that for the term and brand name [pepper] - where now Google is showing a shopping box at the top of the result for the Pepper brand of women's undergarments.

Here is a screenshot:

Pepper Google Search

This came up on Twitter and John Mueller of Google explained, "Things like this can change over time, brands can become stronger than the original meaning of a word even." "It feels a bit weird to me at first, but I don't know the brand nor the product category, and it's US-focused, so it's hard to judge," he added.

One thing SEOs often cringe at is when a company they work with uses a generic name for their brand name. Getting that brand name to rank above the generic meaning is super hard, and something SEOs cannot do alone without big marketing budgets and big TV and radio campaigns.

Here are the tweets related to this:

In this example, the company's website also outranks the Wikipedia entry for the term pepper. Now that is impressive.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google

Google Search Bitcoin Charts Gone - It's A Bug (Now Fixed)

Feb 9, 2025 - 11:45 am
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: February 7, 2025

Feb 7, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Volatility, Google Ads Quality Update, Google AI Overviews Updates & Other Search Engines

Feb 7, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Says People Know When Author Bios Are For SEO Purposes

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Keyword Planner New Auto-Organize Keywords To Ad Groups

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Maps

Google Business Profiles Reinstatements Now Include Case & 5 Upload Documents

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:31 am
Previous Story: Google Testing Things To Know On Right Search Panel