Most of you are probably seeing SearchWiki in action today. It allows anybody to edit and comment on Google search results.
Of course the first thing most of you probably did was vote your sites and your clients up to the top. I did that and regretted it ever since because every day I think we have got top rankings and then have to remember that they aren’t real.
Also voting up sites on day 1 is basically a big red flag to Google saying “I’m an SEO and these are the sites I’m promoting”. Take a look at the SearchWiki notes for some competitive keywords to see what I mean.
Google is going to get a huge amount of data from this and they will use it in some way in the future. Anybody who is sceptical of Googles ability to use user data obviously hasn’t seen how effective Google Local has been in ranking restaurants based on how good they are rather than how many links they have.
What will happen when Google allows people to give star ratings to e-commerce sites in the search results? Big brands with good customer service are going to win. Sites with high quality information & loyal fans are going to win.
PageRank was the ultimate democratic method of rankings sites right up to the point SEO’s started buying links. PageRank was just a clever model to let Google figure out which sites people were voting for online.
Now Google has a big list of sites and a huge list of users they don’t need PageRank – they can ask users to vote directly rather than relying on links. The major flaw with PageRank is that only a few percent of people actually have websites and can influence the search results.
What would Google rather have at the top of the search results? A site that spends £100,000 a month on SEO or a site that 100,000 real life Google users have given a 5 star rating?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Just noticed this myself Patrick, beat me to the post
I’m sure Google will make use of this data, but I see two problems with using it as a large component of the ranking algorithm.
Firstly as soon as it becomes clear that user voting and feedback are a major factor in ranking sites, I can see huge cubicle farms springing up in India and China charging people to interact with, vote and review their site. Local rankings are already being gamed to a large extent though false reviews and addresses . This data is far easier to manufacture than a good link profile.
Secondly, a drawback of using voting and reviews is that it’ll lead to stagnation in the SERPS, the ones already at the top will continue to receive reviews and votes, while many great new sites that don’t get the same level of traffic or attention won’t be able to compete. This already happens to some extent with a link based economy, but can be more easily overcome using traditional PR and offline marketing.
Where I do see this coming in useful for Google is possibly flagging rankings sites for manual review that get a lot of negative feedback. As you say, ensure sites are relevant with good content and you can’t go too far wrong.
I have to agree with Matt that user ranking can’t become that important a factor in ranking and I’m sure that Google are well aware of that. In a perfect world the user ranking aspect would be great though
Likewise, i dont think it’s in googles best interest to incorporate this. It will disencourage startups in fields that are already pretty full but have a fantastic USP that makes the user experience better. Take online shopping there are f’ loads of sites out there, if we used this review method then the top ones will just stay rooted at the top. If we can gain some sort of happy medium then bonus. I think My Yahoo tried to do something similar to this?
Mind you a plus point in this is companies might save money by not needing to spend cash on SEO
Credit crunch and all that.
It will be interesting to see how Google plays this. On one hand it’s clearly the way things are going with search. It takes Stumbleupon and sends it mainstream. But as others have said it is wildly open to abuse. It’s this that has probably stopped Stumbleupon going mainstream so it should be interesting to see how Google handles this.
Have they even announced that what we vote/review will even impact on other peoples serps or is it just something that effects what we see?
Good news for the people who control large botnets (email spammers and spyware companies), It’s a great feature I must admit, but it’s so open to abuse, probably more so than their current link based system. Google will probably start to use a combination of all the data they collect (analytics, toolbar, SERP Clicks etc) to perfect their current algorithm
I cant see this becoming a major factor in the future its just too easy for it to be cheated. Yes it would be a good idea to have search results that are decided by us the users but i just cant see it happening.
It’ll be interesting to see how much of an affect this will have on ranking- i can already foresee that Google will some how be monitoring the users that are voting and the quality of this based on their previous Google history via their Google account login. Suddenly getting a load of new Google accounts for the purposes of voting or accounts taking a strong interest in a subject area that they have not previously been searching about will likely be ringing those alarm bells!
I don’t want to over speculate too much. I don’t think we are going to see major algo changes. Google is just trying to wrap up more market share. Think about all the people who use Google and type in something like ebay.com. This change is only to strengthen the Google being your homepage.
Hi Patrick, it was good to meet you tonight at the SEO get-together. Thought i’d drop in and check out your blog.
We were having a discussion about this in the office today and the general consensus was that Google will use the information in some way but can’t base rankings solely on the results of user votes. My take on it is that this may be an added factor rather than a replacement for anything. Google is aware that links are built and bought but are unable to regulate it given the sheer number of web pages and the clever ways in which SEO professionals perform their link building. However, suppose a website has been propelled to the top of the rankings by an SEO company but searchers vote on the websites around it rather than the website in question, Google may demote the website a place or two . The onus is therefore on companies to ensure that their website is compelling enough to encourage people to vote for it – which was what Google wanted all along, hence the vlaue it placed on inbound links.
I think Google can’t give a lot of weight to this as a factor, maybe just a bit more than clickthrough rates/bounce rates. Because this is highly manipulative. Secondly, just like a few people have sites to give links and pass pagerank, only a small percentage of users will be motivated to vote.
One more point (mentioned by Qu@dsz1lla some days back) is that a user who finds a site useful has to return back to serps to vote and comment. So it won’t speak much about how useful a result is for a specific query. It will be more about how good a brand is.
And the worst problem is who’s going to moderate this. If they just use the Digg model of burying comments, then we can anticipate similar Google Power Users.
“Google is going to get a huge amount of data from this and they will use it in some way in the future. ”
Yes, they’ll also probably have to start censoring comments. Those little comments you can add can really damage brands, like Google’s. Will Google censor people if they use the comment feature to talk badly about Google?
Let’s take this example. If 100 people go to Matt Cutt’s blog and write insidious comments, he’s not going to approve them. But what if 100 people write insidious comments about Matt Cutt’s blog in the searchwiki. Everyone logged into their Google account who visits Cutt’s site will be able to see them. It’s like a loophole around him disapproving comments. So, what will happen in time? How long before Google starts censoring comments…they’re supposed to be your own personal comments, but..not so much because other people have the ability to see them.
Just know this news. thanks. I will submit my blog now.
I am able to get it where i am located (mid west usa) but im not sure if all users are able to see the google searchwiki showing up on their screens yet. If not there is a video and some screen shots of the searchwiki at http://www.thesearchwiki.com do you guys think this will take off? do you think it will effect the search engine search results drastically from now on?
Yeah, I fell for that too. “Ooh! Look! We’re number one for that query we wanted! … wait, why is the arrow green beside it?”
I found you can clear the ranking by hitting the ‘See all my SearchWiki notes’ link at the bottom of the SERPs page and then clicking ‘Restore’.
I think that, long term, searchers will find this less useful than it appears – 9 times out of 10 Sam Searcher goes to a search engine to find something new, not something he has ranked up, and that 10th time he’s running the same query – the result was already there.
I’ll be interested to see if it adds value to the SERPs, but I will be surprised if it does.
Isn’t it going to harm SEOs in long term? I mean if everyone starts using SearchWiki aggressively then you’ll never be able to push your site through to the top.
I think one of Google’s arguments was that they reckon about 40% of people are repeating the same search frequently – using the SERPs almost like a bookmarking service.
I’m wondering if, as G crams more and more stuff into the SERPs, there will be a market for an good old-fashioned “just the results ma’am” search engine. Maybe they’ll have a Google-Classic option – from a user perspective, I hope so!
Cheers, Jon
I also strongly believe it is Google moving further into the social bookmarking / personalised search space to increase market share, rather than a cynical way of gathering intelligence to modify search rank – although this could inevitably be the by-product!
If Google allow us to influence live search ranking I think more weight will passed onto trusted Google account owners who have been registered for years and have a good Google footprint. Those who have just signed up will have little or no influence on the rankings in live search.
to be honest, if this actually does happen and the searcher can influence search rankings it will cause absolute uproar in the SEO community. Already we see professional marketing gurus biting their nails.
Some good points in the comments guys but I am not worried about it now and wont be for about 5 years. Its around that time that most of the general internet surfers will actually notice that it exists (at least in Europe). We know abut it because we have to but Joe Q public wont have or give a sod will they and they would generally decide that they have much more beneficial things to do than tapping keywords in and making lists that does nothing for them.
Building farms of people with Gmail accounts is a potential problem I suppose if it does become a used feature but even then they will recode or change the algorithm to suit. Worry about doing what needs to be done here and now I say… (praying at the moment that this kind of thing doesn’t take off!)
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