Pleasanton Web Design

Google is at it again. Their “Google Caffeine” infrastructure update was vastly increased their computing power. That update has paved the way for features many of the new features that we’ve seen recently, such as Google Instant.

Today you may notice little magnifying glass icons next the your search results. Clicking on any of these icons will activate “Google Instant Previews.” On clicking you are presented with a thumbnail image of the website in the result, and from then on, rolling over the other results will also display the thumbnail of the associated website.

One positive result of Google Instant Previews, for those of us in the web design business, is that sites that are horribly ugly (a.k.a. not professionally designed) will most likely see a drop-off in traffic. Of course this will depend on the vertical involved, but I think most consumers will use this preview to filter out sites that look cheap, low-quality and unprofessional. Made For Adwords (mfa) sites will hopefully see a significant drop in traffic as will a lot of other spam, which is often easy to identify visually.

Across the board I think people will see less traffic overall, but their bounce rate should also decrease, as searchers no longer need to click in to get a preview of their website.

Another consequence I would expect, would be a lower CTR (click-through rate) for Adwords. Why? 1)Because Adwords ads do not have the Instant Preview feature, they are functionally separated from the natural results more than they have been in the past. In fact many searchers don’t know the difference between sponsored results and natural results, and to them, clicking on one was no different than clicking on the other. Now if the searcher likes the Instant Preview feature, they will be less likely to waste the extra click on the sponsored results that don’t have it. 2) At popular screen resolutions the Instant Previews actually block the Adwords ads.

I must admit I can’t imagine that Google would do anything to decrease the click-through for Adwords. It’s their bread and butter, and almost all of the recent changes they’ve made recently have had the effect of pushing searchers to Adwords, be it by rearranging the real estate, or pushing searchers to more popular key phrases.

What do you think?

A search engine called “Blekko“  launched to the general public yesterday. Who needs another search engine you ask? Well, Blekko is a little different than Yahoo, Google or Bing.

Blekko is designed for “vertical search.” Verticals, as far as search engines go, are topics of interest to the searcher. Blekko’s verticals are defined by things called “slashtags.” Unlike Twitter slashtags, which are used to attribute tweets to the proper source, Blekko slashtags refer to groupings of websites, associated by topic. So, for instance if you are interested in skiing, you could do a search like “vacation rentals /ski.” Your search for “vacation rentals” would be performed only in those web sites the Blekko people have associated with the “/ski” slashtag.

As a registered user, you can also create your own slashtags, associate them with the websites you choose, and make them public. You can do something similar, with Google, but Blekko is designed around this concept.

Sound like something useful? Not so fast. Try searching Blekko and you will quickly find out that the results are completely atrocious. Why? The most obvious drawback to me is that having the Blekko people select sites they think best define a topic I am interested in is an impossible task.

Can they improve the implementation of their concept? They’d better if they are going to succeed! I’ve had access to Blekko since it was in beta, and I haven’t found it useful yet. Maybe I’m not part of the target audience, but I sure do a lot of searches. Given Google and a well crafted key phrase, you can easily drill down into that vertical and come up with rich results, without having someone filtering the results with topic categorization. And the very idea that you would limit yourself by creating your own slashtags to group your favorite websites seems absurd. The serendipity of searching the Internet is finding something new on a website you’ve never seen before.

I noticed yet another change yesterday in the way Google is displaying results. It’s not the recent algorithm change that has many in the SEO industry complaining that their sites have been trashed. It’s not the also-recent indexing glitch that has yet to be resolved and has many new pages, including blog posts like this one, going unindexed for extended periods. It’s not Google Instant, taking a big bite out of the long-tail. This change has to do with the serving of local maps “places” results outside of the maps box, and over most of the natural results.

One variation of the new format gives a huge amount of real estate to the local results by pulling them out of the maps box and reformatting them to a size that is now twice the height of the natural results. With one or two Adwords results, then two natural results followed by six huge Google Places results, natural result number 3 might as well be on Page 2. If the Google Places ad includes an image, then the searcher is offered a chance to click on it and remain on Google property, and be exposed to another batch of Adwords results. Or in other words another Google income opportunity.

The second variation I am now seeing basically pulls the Places results out of the maps box, without reformatting them, but includes 3 Adwords results at the top and zero natural results before the Places results. With this variation, having the number 1 natural result is not so great anymore. It’s probably more like having a number 5 or 6 position.

For local businesses with results in Places, but not in the natural results, this may be a good thing. For searchers who are looking for a local company, this change may be good as well. Especially with the first variation I noted, the SEO landscape when it comes to natural local search is changing significantly, with Google Places playing an increasingly important role.

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