B2B Markeplace

Google has recently made changes to its basic search page. Are these affecting your business’s website’s search engine positioning and attempts to apply search engine optimisation? It is the opinion of a lot of industry commentators that there is now too much clutter on a Google results page and many users were suggesting that additional buttons be provided so that certain types of result are not returned. Google has now added some additional filtering – but not in the way that these commentators expected. The typical reaction to the changes has not been favourable.

On the basic Google front page in the UK there was a button that could be selected to specify “pages from the UK”. This has now gone but the corresponding filter can be applied somewhere else. It is only when you have made your search request you are given the choice of reducing the results to your country only. This is now part of an array of additional filtering options that appear on the left hand side of the results page. It is this location of the additional options that is raising the most comment with search marketing commentators, as the new list add to the baggage on an already busy results page, reducing thevisible area of the actual results page.

The additional options appear to provide additional data rather than less. In a local search where a map is shown you can reduce the results to just the map but not exclude it from the original request. For a search request that includes the word “Cardiff”, then a map may be sensible, but it could be a reference to the cinematographer “Jack Cardiff” so a map would be pointless. In its attempts to enhance the results page, Google appears to taking location information from the address of the PC making the search to make its results more local. This makes it useful when examining your business’s domain during search optimization that your contact address is easily indexed by the search engines.

There is also an option to specify a time frame, which is handy for a search for a topical|news item|story|event – but is that going to penalise a website that has used search optimization some time ago and achieves a high organic search engine positioning for its relevance but has not been updated recently?

There is still demand for an option to exclude the social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Google and the other search engines believe that they are trying to develop the search result by including realtime data from these sources. search engine optimisation cannot have any influence on the data obtained from a social network, and it is very easy to organise a campaign to exaggerate the importance of a website and artificially elevate its organic listing. This sort of action effectively equates to spamming. This leads to distrust of the search platform and of the given website. If a button to exclude data from the social networks was made available, it would allow organisations whose websites have been optimised using current search optimization methods to achieve a more reliable ranking.

Google’s attempts to add the versatility that users are requesting appears to have misfired for now. Perhaps a another attempt will regain its reputation with users. Using search engine optimisation strategies to your business’s domain will still have an influence on your search engine positioning with Google and the other search engines