Google SearchWiki and the Future of Search Engine Marketing
Google SearchWiki was launched in November of 2008 with the purpose of personalizing searches and providing an opportunity to share comments among Google users regarding websites and search results. Since then, many SEM experts have been asking themselves, “where is Google going with this?” As with any new innovation, this new feature comes with pros and cons.
Danny Sullivan moderated a session with Corey Anderson, a Google engineer, on Wiki Search at the 2009 SMX West conference. The two of them managed to evoke many interesting points of discussion. According to Google’s representative, the personalized rankings (Wiki Search) are not currently being taken into consideration for Google’s primary search results. So, for all of you who started asking your friends and family to move your website into the number 1 position in their wiki searches, according to Google, this currently has no influence on the rankings. However, the possibility of these personalized rankings having an effect on search results has not been ruled out for the future.
One apparent negative impact Google’s SearchWiki will have on SEM professionals is the difficulty that will come with gathering ranking data and drawing identifiable comparisons from analytics data based on those rankings, as an individual’s personalized rankings will play a part in this traffic. Ultimately, search rankings will become of much less importance if this does become a reality.
On the other hand, Google will open up the competition with personalized rankings, as domain age will be an unlikely factor in how an individual searcher ranks sites in their personal listings. This will present the opportunity for new ecommerce and informational sites with high relevancy to a search topic to appear in the top rankings, as searchers will have the ability to judge what is the most relevant, regardless of the age of the domain.
This last point could ultimately be a plus for all web users. In order to gain rankings, website owners will be forced to include content relevant to the user rather than building sites primarily for the search engines. Users will now be choosing the websites they want to visit repeatedly, and this will inform Google which sites are meeting the needs of what a user is searching for. Google will be giving more control to the visitors and therefore, websites must be created with the primary goal of appealing to their target audience.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, “but what about spamming with negative or positive comments to remove your competitors?” Google made it clear that they will be reviewing the comments very carefully to avoid any red flag or black hat motives. This will hopefully ensure that this type of spamming will not be a problem to your website’s rankings.
Whether you like it or not, Google is constantly gathering information from everything you are searching for, regardless if you are logged in or not. Currently, Google alerts you when a search result has been customized according to previous searches and your location. However, many people may not realize that even when Google doesn’t inform you that the results have been customized, they may have been, most likely in a less obvious way. In certain instances, it is better to avoid user confusion rather than alert the user to these results.
Currently, Google is testing this Wiki functionality for their PPC ad space as well. While this is currently an issue that SEO folks are working to solve, PPC should also be paying close attention, as this will most likely effect how quality scores and bid prices will be determined in the future.
The World Wide Web is becoming more personal on a daily basis, and if websites are not prepared to handle this, they will no longer be able to effectively compete in the same search space that they may have previously dominated in the past.
