“Digged” Up By Surprise on Google

It has been awhile since i’ve blogged, but I was compelled to today as I was surprised by Google’s new SearchWiki tools [I say "new" lightly - it launched in Nov.] At any rate, you might have noticed that if you are signed into your Google account and browsing the Web next to each of your search results is an option to “remove” “promote” or add a “comment” to your search.

I quickly did a Google search to learn more…below is an article from BetaNews. Through the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link, a user can cross-reference his query results with another user’s. Each user’s comments remain his own, and do not affect others’ searches. And, the “2.0″ nature of SearchWiki allows the efficacy of search results to be tested against other users’ satisfaction and preferences – sort of similar to Digg, but for search results.

So this poses the question – will this fundamentally change the way we conduct SEO?

A post on Lead Maverick argues the following points…

First, the Google SearchWiki is only available to those who are logged in to a Google account. While this is a tremendous amount of users, it is not the whole universe of those who use Google.

Second, it does require the user to interact with the search results page. For some, this may be more than they want to do if they are researching a topic and quickly want to view the information from the source.

Third, the default view that is presented to users is still based on Google’s personalized search options – which have always been specific to the expected needs of the user.

And finally, although an obvious point, it is worth remembering that Google does not own 100% of the searches out there; this will not affect searches on Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask and the other search engines.

If anything this presents an opportunity to get additional organic rankings for those Google users who start looking at the SearchWiki notes for keywords.

Ultimately, it is agreed that it is still too early to determine if this new Google SearchWiki will alter the field. But it certainly forces us to reassess the role SEO plays.

The article did, however also suggest how marketers may take advantage of Google SearchWiki

1.     If you do not have a Google account, get one! You will need to be logged in to Google in order to see this new feature.

2.     Start researching your keyword list in Google and do the following – move your listings up! Although you will be the only user who sees your listing up at the top of your page, your listing will get added to the “all notes” public page for that particular search term. In a sense, this notes page will become a secondary SERP page based on user behavior. Although Google says that the user behavior will not influence the search algorithm for other users, they very well could change that in the future.

3.     Add comments to your listings in the SERP SearchWiki. This is THE MOST important thing you can do RIGHT NOW. Comments are available to other users and form an extra layer of content for your listing. You MUST be aggressive in this as others will comment as well.

A lot of commentary on Google SearchWiki has appeared online including an excellent article in Search Engine Land on how it works (Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide article); and on eWeek.com on how businesses can use this SearchWiki (Google SearchWiki a Genius Stroke to Keep Us in Google, Seeing Ads article). Also you may read about the launch of the Google SearchWiki on Google’s blog.

Advertisement