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Google Instant - The end of SEO as we know it?

maximus20895

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I'm not sure how this prevents the use of long tail keywords. You still need them in order to stay on top of google's first page.
 

Icy

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SEO for [niche] businesses has been on it's way out the door before this came about. Searches, and how they are determined will be broken down into at least two groups.

1. Information
2. Business (service)

Group 1 is how search results are prioritized now. Anyone in this area has little to worry about, unless you're in a very niche group.

Group 2 is the interesting one though. Searches for services are going to be unique to each individual user rather than everyone getting the same results.

It's 'easy' (I use that loosely) to figure out the top result for information. A good article\tutorial on to learn from is almost guaranteed to be a good article\tutorial for everyone.

A business that provides a service is not such a 'one size fits all' formula to search. Using the current formula if I wanted to find a gym I'd search something like:

'gym [insert town\city name]' and get a bunch of results

Wouldn't it be more relevant to display results of the most popular gym my friends go to. My friends going there, and 'liking it' (however that is to be decided) is a reccomendation that I'd like it more than SEO could guess.

It's important to know that someone living the the same town\city could get completely different results searching the exact same thing.

Idk if all this makes sense, but I'm just trying to spit it out in short. I need to write something on this to really explain it. haha
 

Bond

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"Google Instant turns search into a realtime stream of results which flow onto your screen as you type your query. With each letter you type, a whole new set of results flash by. This is important for several reasons. First and foremost, you will now see many more search results than you would have otherwise. Most people never click through to the second page of search results. If it is not in the first ten blue links (or really the first five or six), it might as well not exist for most people. With Google Instant search, instead of people seeing only ten results, they may now see 50 or 100 (depending on how many letters they type and how far they get through each search query)."

"SEO (Search engine optimization) will change as well. Sites will need to optimize for particular letter combinations, not just entire keywords. It will be interesting to see whether results get spammed or if Google will gain the upperhand in this constant cat and mouse game."

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/08/google-instant-speed-volume/
 
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Icy

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"SEO (Search engine optimization) will change as well. Sites will need to optimize for particular letter combinations, not just entire keywords. It will be interesting to see whether results get spammed or if Google will gain the upperhand in this constant cat and mouse game."

Let's be honest at most people will look at the results word, by word. Showing results letter by letters is cool, but the middle of a word is not a natural stopping point for people.

Will changing the word letter by letter change the results that much? It'd be much quicker to just type the word than to look at the results for each letter.
 

biophase

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You basically will need to optimize for googles first suggested phrase. The biggest difference is whether it ends in a (s) or not.

I wonder how many people use the google homepage. I only use the google toolbar so I would have never noticed it.
 

Gymjunkie

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The Facebook search initiative where you can get results from two levels of your friends (friends and friends of friends) is more interesting I'd say. But SEO will change probably with this (unless it fails like Wave did...).
 
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Bond

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You basically will need to optimize for googles first suggested phrase. The biggest difference is whether it ends in a (s) or not.

I wonder how many people use the google homepage. I only use the google toolbar so I would have never noticed it.

They plan to include it native in browsers in the next few months...
 

Bond

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Let's be honest at most people will look at the results word, by word. Showing results letter by letters is cool, but the middle of a word is not a natural stopping point for people.

Will changing the word letter by letter change the results that much? It'd be much quicker to just type the word than to look at the results for each letter.

The problem is that the end of the word will be there due to autocomplete so people may tend to abandon the search if they see the end of the word or/and see the desired results...
 

CommonCents

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I do see more and more people posting on FB for recommendations for services/products from their network of friends.

Also location based search is very important to customize search for each invidividual. Mass customization is on!
 
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TC2

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As far as I can see, local business website with location optimized will get better exposures over time.

Facebook social search is also on the rise. The search traffic from Facebook increased 2400% in the last 30 days.

I will wait and see how the search traffic from Google goes before changing anything.
 

andviv

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terence, I agree with you... not sure how this will impact my sites or my customers' so for now I will not do anything and spend some time playing with test cases and see what happens.
 

biophase

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This is huge for some companies. Imagine that you are looking for an Xbox. You type in X and the fourth choice is xkcd, you've never heard of it but scroll down just to see what it is. It's a cartoon site that you didn't know about!!! It's good to be xkcd!!!
 
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Bond

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What i think will happen if this takes off is that we will see people targeting for half words and not full words like we do right now...
 

Gymjunkie

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What i think will happen if this takes off is that we will see people targeting for half words and not full words like we do right now...

But will Google keep those half-words as keywords themselves or they will be linked to full words? I think they will be linked to full words and SEO wont change cuz you already rank for full ones.
 

andviv

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I've been instructing my customers to optimize for the singular keyword, instead of the plural [see my 'dancing shoes' study case thread]. I think this makes sense although it is too soon for me to actual have metrics on how effective this will be, I am just following 'common sense'.
 
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biophase

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I think it is really keyword dependent. I have some keywords that google instant automatically puts the "s" on the back, so the singular will not come up or be searched unless the person actually types the full keyword in without the S.

If you type dancing s, google instant shows the results for "dancing shoes" not dancing shoe.
 

andviv

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I think it is really keyword dependent. I have some keywords that google instant automatically puts the "s" on the back, so the singular will not come up or be searched unless the person actually types the full keyword in without the S.

If you type dancing s, google instant shows the results for "dancing shoes" not dancing shoe.
Great point. Rep++

For the real case of the Dancing Shoes scenario, the singular made sense as that is the one offered by google.

Another case, let's say, 'soccer ball' vs 'soccer balls' it was the opposite, so I instructed this customer to optimize for the keyword with higher volume of searches.
 

Jonleehacker

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Was watching my wife (who could be described as a typical Google user) do a search last night.

She never even noticed the "instant" results changing as she typed.

Supported my theory that Google Instant has a bunch of people who think about SEO excited, but will not really have much affect on the general public.
 
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Russ H

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I do see more and more people posting on FB for recommendations for services/products from their network of friends.

Question: Is it possible to get facebook alerts (like google alerts) when keywords like "Napa B&B" are used by ANY facebook member?

(sorry if this is a noob question-- we could really use this!)

-Russ H.
 

Russ H

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Was watching my wife (who could be described as a typical Google user) do a search last night.

She never even noticed the "instant" results changing as she typed.

Supported my theory that Google Instant has a bunch of people who think about SEO excited, but will not really have much affect on the general public.

Interesting.

I do think it will change search results-- and that google will actually be getting more extraneous searches by some folks who see interesting things as they type.

And I also think that this will take a few weeks/months for people to notice-- and USE.

We'll see! :)

-Russ H.
 

Icy

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Question: Is it possible to get facebook alerts (like google alerts) when keywords like "Napa B&B" are used by ANY facebook member?

(sorry if this is a noob question-- we could really use this!)

-Russ H.

Not for ANY facebook member. But you could create something to get an alert for all profiles who have statuses on public. Actually there is something to search all public profiles statuses for key words, but it still wouldn't be an alert unless you create something to check for new ones and send you an alert..
 
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Jonleehacker

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Question: Is it possible to get facebook alerts (like google alerts) when keywords like "Napa B&B" are used by ANY facebook member?

Well if you set up a Google alert for that term, in theory it will trigger on any public Facebook page that contains that term, however large sections of FB are only available to logged in users, and then the majority of those pages are only accessible to a subset of logged in users (friends or fans of a page) so no indexing or scanning service will ever have access to everything.

Even if FB did provide such a service, and say the term came up on someone's wall and you got an alert, you would either a.) not be able to see the post, or b.) not be able to interact with it.
 

biophase

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For the real case of the Dancing Shoes scenario, the singular made sense as that is the one offered by google.

Andres,

In my browsers Google offers only Dancing Shoes with the "S". Is it different on yours?
 

andviv

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oops. soory for the confusion.

I was talking about the thread I created for the case study of a real customer I had. I did not want to tell everybody in the public forum what his real keywords were, so I used 'dancing shoes' as an example of that case.

So, for this customer, the singular expression is the 'correct' solution for him. Makes sense?
 

Jonleehacker

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Found this today and thought it was worth updating this thread...

See all 15 here: The 15 Greatest Google Autocomplete Fails

My fav: :coco:

clip_image004_thumb.jpg
 

Russ H

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Jon Lee-

OMG, that one made me laugh out loud! :rofl::rofl::rofl:

And the link-- scary stuff!

People can use google instant as a sociology tool!

-Russ H.
 
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mtnman

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I call bullshit.

I don't see any difference in my G referral traffic.

Oh, and isn't it called Search Engine Optimization for a reason?... there's always something to optimize. ;)
 

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