Google Launches New Organic Search Algorithm – Emphasis is on Breaking News and Commenting systems like Facebook, and Google+.
[display_podcast]
According to the Search Marketing company Covario, the goal of this change is simple. For queries conducted by searchers where information changes constantly—which Google estimates is about 35% of the queries—there is a new rendering of the organic results page starting with “news for QUERY.”
The speculation is that this is a strategic response to Facebook and Twitter—i.e., provision of real time information through directed queries on relevant topics (as opposed to open stream of incoming information, albeit timely, from competing social media platforms). Also, at a technical level, Google is rolling out some new technology to Googlebot that helps the system better index AJAX/Java Script commenting systems like Facebook, along with Google+. Walk aways for Web professionals include:
* Social signals is s strong factor
* Early end of the buying cycle
* Reputation management
In this five minute interview with Pete Dudchenko, Senior Director Covario provides a couple of recommendations for our customers to help them understand what impact this will have on SEO results, and what they need to do to address this change.
First, social media will be more intertwined into SEO. Remember 18 months ago, Google rolled out the “Latest”
function; a secondary page that users could activate on the left hand navigation to see social media data. We wrote
about that update and said at the time “that if more than 10% of queries ultimately go to this secondary page, then
optimizing for “recency” as well as “relevancy” will become the key to SEO. And how will that be done—integration of social media programs with SEO.” This is an upgrade to this function that a) moves the “latest” to the main SERP and b) does so only for a subset of queries where recency is relevant. So social media programs—i.e., updates to Facebook and Twitter comments by advertisers, updated reviews, and any time of blog based content generation will require infusion with high value SEO keywords and link backs to other content pages in order to align with the high value queries and command the newly available premium shelf space.
Second, the high value generic keywords will make up the majority of the frequent updates (“Best camera,” “cheap
laptop,” “best tablet”) category of affected queries. If advertisers are going to build their processes—we recommend this. Identify the top 25 queries driving traffic to their site. Conduct queries and see if the “News for” box is appearing. If so, monitor competitor and advertiser presence on a series of queries over a week or two and see what happens. If there is degradation in corresponding web traffic during this time period, then these become the priority for the social media programs content generation.
Last, reputation management will also be impacted. Industry announcements, including company wins and losses will find their way to the top of the rankings and may begin to overtake historically high ranking pages for branded search terms. This is both positive and negative depending on how good the news is on a given topic. Reacting quickly to negative publicity, while promoting positive news, through the systems by which “News for” reacts will become a key aspect of public relations. Additional information can be found on the Covario website