Google Is Better On Caffeine?

Published on August 11th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

Google continually fiddles with the way in which search results are ranked and presented. Usually we find out after the fact. This time, Google is telling us beforehand, and inviting comments, on the Google Webmaster Blog. What’s the significance?

• Early warning of rank changes – helpful to know, and there’s a feedback form at the bottom of the page.
• Competitive response to Binghoo – telling the world they aren’t a relaxed incumbent
• Future indicator of AdWords policy and QS changes

Does this announcement imply any more than that? I don’t know yet. I’ll have to think about it a bit longer.

Geolocation

This test is only available in the US, making testing a bit of a pain. But for certain categories of search, local results should dominate national well ranked results. If you want to find a company that can fix a lawnmower, then finding a high ranked site that is 2000 miles away is probably much less useful than finding a low Page Rank site 20 miles away. While the internet has globalised some functions – purchasing products across international borders is now much easier, even if the legal framework hasn’t fully caught up with the capability – there’s still lots of local needs.

So I’m expecting to test local searches extensively… And I’ll be looking for how my US clients stack up in results and to see what happens to a few of my European clients to see what happens to their results.

AdWords Implications?

AdWords policies aren’t always the same as Google organic search policies. However, it is clear that Google often applies lessons from organic search to paid search. For example, organic search duplicate content rules have become stricter over the years and AdWords has more strictly interpreted duplicate advertising to the annoyance and frustration of many affiliates.

Quality Score is also clearly drawn from organic search patterns – the requirements that landing pages include text matching keywords and advert is well known by now. Whether that’s a valid mechanism or not is still, for me, up for some dispute – I’m pretty sure that I can design a highly converting page that would be given a very low landing page quality score, proving it popular with users and unpopular with Google’s current initial QS rating mechanisms.

I’ll be looking at whether changed organic search results might have any impact on Quality Score. That’ll have little immediate impact on current PPC strategies, I expect, but I often find that an exercise of testing improves understanding of the current system – so there will probably be accidental learnings that may change strategies for some clients.

First Impressions

This is the result of a small sample of twenty high volume searches for a specific client. Looks like important sites move up; heavily optimised sites by “unknowns” are moving down a little or are completely lost.

If continued in other tests, this may indicate a trend that Google has been following recently. The old “you were linked to lots so you must be important” rule has been replaced over the years with refinements like “but you were linked to by places that you linked to in massive link directories” and “but you were linked to massively from free for all directories”. I’m not sure what the basis is for Caffeine, but I’m guessing that other factors about the business are being taken more seriously. Possibly mentions on other key business web sites, and further de-ranking of social commentary sites often abused by SEO efforts?

Time to do some some more testing and see whether any statistical correlations can be made between mentions in different types of sites and the rank changes. That’ll be time consuming, but may shed some illumination for future strategy :)