Nov. 21, 2008 - Google Changed But the Inman Article is Wrong—Must Read
I saw many recent articles speculating about what Google was going to change and what really bothers me is that no one actually read what Google had to say about the subject. There were some major changes and I just posted an article about what specifically Google is changing, please read that article first so you can understand what SearchWiki actually is.
But the Inman article is just wrong.
Why?
Well for starters the title is entirely misleading. Nothing has been done to change PageRank. Will they change this? Of course. Everyone in the SEO business knows that Google is constantly tinkering and trying to improve results. But no one would go so far as to say that PageRank is a thing of the past. Well no one so far...
I am speculating and I admit this but I am almost positive that the original person in question confused the new SearchWiki with changes being made to Google's search engine. Why do I say this? Because it just makes more sense.
First lets go to the actual source instead of speculating on someone else's speculations.
“Behavior Based Search
He provided a specific example of a search for "java". Some are looking for programming, some are looking for the beverage, and some are looking for travel information. Theoretically, personal search will know that and provide results accordingly.”
This is exactly what the Searchwiki does. It lets you sort the results and save them so when you search later you don't get conflicting results. Would Google tailor the results on its own search engine? Possibly, but it wouldn't affect how your website is found. Instead it would only help you in ranking. Instead of competing with websites that aren't similar results would be returned that are more specific to what the user was searching for. In Real Estate terms this might mean taking out national sites and providing more local results, thus less competition for you and even better results for the end user.
“Intent-based Search
Google has been looking up your IP and revising results based on IP. They know where you're located and can make assumptions about the intent of your search. As you get more into intent-based search, it's going to change the way pages rank”
Google has looked at your IP address and returned results accordingly for a long time. This is not news. I don't know why it is being presented this way. Of course intent is important. Thats what Google has been trying to go after from the start. What you are intending to search for should be the same as what your results return in the search you perform. Duh!
"Ranking is dead, says Bruce”
WRONG
I don't know where Bruce Clay got this information from but it certainly is not Google. I am pretty sure his intent was to say something radical, basically for his own self-serving purposes and it seemed to work. There is absolutely no way that Google is killing PageRank off anytime soon or if ever. Sure Google will reformulate how PR is determined but it cant possibly kill it off. If it did then whoever made a website previous to this would forever be in the top results and whoever makes a new website would forever not be found. This doesn't even sound right. Google has always rewarded websites with a longer history than newer websites. Why would this suddenly change now? Also backlinks are important, will they be forever? Probably. How else can you determine how important a site is if its not “rated” by other users by linking to it (SearchWiki if the data is ever incorporated will only ever have a slight weight). Will this change? Of course. Some people have noted that Google is discounting older links, such as older blog posts and only counting newer ones. What does this mean for you and your site? You have to constantly work on it! You cant be lazy. If you did SEO work in the past, don't quit now!
“"ranking is dead, and traffic is all that matters."
Wrong again. Google already has analytics data to know how much traffic your site is getting in comparison to other sites. If Google started ranking by solely weighing on traffic, the winner would be whoever has the most money to pay for traffic. This could easily be manipulated as well. You could hire out people to surf your site. Bots could be written to fake surf. In fact this is just not true. Again there is absolutely no evidence for this. Also note that this completely contradicts the Inman article. Bruce says traffic matters, the Inman article says conversion matters. Umm, Houston we have a problem. Both are wrong in that neither has much to do with how or if ever your site will be ranked.
“Universal Search
If you don't have video and your competition does, Bruce thinks we're going to see a big shift in rankings. He thinks if the top ten sites don't have video, they may lose their ranking over night”
Wrong again. What Bruce is speculating is that your site would be ranked higher simply because it has video? Does that even make sense. So one night the results are turned upside down because of the lack of video then overnight everyone adds video to their sites and it goes back to normal. This doesn't sound well thought out and obviously is not true. Google has ranked sites that use video higher for a long time. You do get a slight bump. A slight bump in the rankings. Will this change? Probably not.
So what did change with video?
GAUDI: Google Audio Indexing
What is Google Audio Indexing?
Google Audio Indexing is a new technology from Google that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken.
What GAUDI means is someone wrote a program to write speech to text and then let Google index the results. Will this affect search results? It might improve your ranking slightly by letting Google index the information more quickly and possibly act as a meta description of some sorts. Currently they know a video is there but have no idea what the content of the video is other than the title and any other tags you add. So yes this might improve the results and give a slight advantage to those who put video on their site but as I pointed out in my other article if Google were to attribute as much weight to this as Bruce Clay is suggesting “He thinks if the top ten sites don't have video, they may lose their ranking over night” then every site would just add video and we would be back to 0. This does not sound like Google one bit. It makes little or no sense. Again this sounds more like creating a scandal for your own purposes rather than legitimate news, especially when Google's own blog basically refutes this.
“There's no question that if everything Bruce talked about comes true, the SEO world will be turned on its ear.”
Well no doubt it would. But none of it is true. There is no evidence for anything that he is proposing. Instead it simply looks like he was describing the functions of some of these new tools that Google has unveiled.
As to the article on Inman.
“The days of Googling your keywords to measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy are coming to an end.”
.
I don't see this anywhere in the original article. This seems to be further speculation at best and a misrepresentation of what the SearchWiki actually does. As I pointed out in my other article there is no proof that Google is changing their search engine at the moment to include individualized searching. There is no reason why key words wouldn't work. Of course you cant see what individual people are searching for and where they go. You cant now and you wont be able to probably ever. Even if a person changes their own searches that doesn't mean it will have any effect on how your website shows up in normal results.
“Google will be tuning into the specific behaviors of individual users to serve up more customized results.”
Again this is just not true. The Ars article even says “We're not sure whether Google plans to incorporate user feedback from SearchWiki into its normal search results, or whether the company simply planned to consider the extra data when determining the relevance of its own rankings.”
Stop misrepresenting what is actually going on. Even if Google does incorporate these and of course they will, that doesn't mean they will put more weight on this over anything else they currently do. Its more likely they will put some weight but probably not a lot. Why? Because it is too easily manipulated. Igoogle accounts could be created and then manipulate the results of a search and send this data in. I am sure there would be hundreds of other ways to do this as well. So as usual Google might change their algorithm but is that news? I don't think so. Especially since we are talking a slight change at best.
“More individualized search results means higher conversion rates for companies that have a well built website.”
Umm? That doesn't even make sense. Of course well built sites will have higher conversion rates, or in theory they should, but thats not what SearchWiki does. Nothing has changed. If a person searches now and your site comes up and they go to it or they don't, that is no different than if they sorted out their own results and either moved yours up or down or removed it entirely from their results. How does that affect conversion? That means your site was either effective or not in attracting them but that changes absolutely nothing between then or now. I don't know if I explained that well enough but I think you catch my drift. If you don't turn up in search results you will never be found. Google is not changing that. If you do turn up and whether they go to your site or not changes nothing as well. Can Google even tell if you convert? NO. They have no way of knowing this. Can they tell if you got a phone call? No. This is just really bad speculation and completely ignores how this works and why it works the way it does.
“It forces website owners and SEO professionals to take a closer look of what traffic is actually DOING when it gets to your website.”
No it does not. If someone rates your site poorly or removes it from their own results, well you lost a potential customer there. But you would have already lost them even before this new system! They just wouldn't go to your site! This happens all the time. If you search for something statistics show a huge percentage goes to the first result and a smaller portion to the second and thats about it. If you aren't in the top results you probably aren't getting much traffic to begin with. This new search method would do nothing to affect this.
I am very disappointed that so many people read these articles and came away with all the wrong conclusions. I hope you can see how Bruce was wrong to begin with and how through a series of unfortunate events somehow became true. It is clearly not. Do not stop doing what you are doing now. Good organic SEO will probably always work. By its very nature it works because you are not manipulating anything other than trying to work on the basic model itself: A person opens up Google and searches using key words and websites are returned as a result based on these key words” By working with Google to improve the results, thats what organic SEO is all about! Nothing is changing that way. Will it someday? Maybe, but why would Google ever walk away from this model?
I guess nothing has changed in the way of media. Good headlines make good traffic, regardless of whether the information is true or not. I just hope enough people read this compared to how many are probably calling their SEO person, scrambling to make changes for no reason.
 
| 
RSS Blog Feed
