Over the week of Thanksgiving in the US we noticed that Google had made an update to their system. After countless hours of examination it now appears the focus on this move was to push the “Top 10” (the first 10 sites to appear for competitive terms) to more information based resources. This is a good example of the information bias Google is showing right now. “Buy Stocks” is, in our opinion, a term someone would type into a search engine when they are ready to make an actual purchase. As you can see from the results all the organic listings are primarily information sources (wikis, encyclopedias, media sites, and how to articles) while the options to actually purchase stocks are relegated to the paid listings.
Why Google Would Do This
I don’t think it comes to any real surprise - Google makes their money from running ads. Let me repeat, Google makes a LOT of money running ads on their search results. Now that Google is a public corporation they have a responsibility to their shareholders to increase profits - without coming up with a new purple cow (which Google, sadly, has had trouble doing).
I want to stress that this not the death of search engine optimization. It simply presents new challenges and new opportunities for businesses.
What You Can Do
• Create an information hub on your site.
• Write a blog and utilize your RSS feed
• Create pages on up-and-coming authority sites and link back to your primary page
• Focus on Social Media Optimization and create popular viral ads
• And of course, up your PPC spending.
These are a few of our suggestions– what do you plan to do as the information bias increases?
December 11th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
How can I get people to actually see my blog and how can I get my blog to make me money. I created a blog on blogger but it doesn’t seem to be helping my online sales.
December 17th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
I’m glad Google has made their search engines more information based. Now the search engines can do what they are supposed to do and thats deliver good information that is relevant. No more can companies “buy their way to the top”. I also like how you can use a combination of RSS, Blogs and PING your way through the hierachy of online information. This also elminates a lot of wasteful spending and everything is now trackable. In fact, you can even track blogs and locate your source of traffic.