Google in 2012
In a rare post on his personal blog, Matt Cutts, Google's personal web spam warrior, asked readers to make suggestions about improvements that could be made to Google in 2012. Obviously such a well-known figure posing an opening question in public inspired some pretty "far-out" (to use the vernacular) ideas and numerous ironic rants about removing spam from the SERPs. Fortunately, there were a number of great ideas suggested, so I thought it might be a good idea run through a few of them and the potential impact they could have on search marketing and search engine optimisation.
1. Bottomless Search
This was an idea suggested by several people – Google should have bottomless SERPs. Currently the user needs to click a button to reach subsequent results pages from after the first page of results. Bottomless SERPs would mean that instead of clicking, when the user's scrollbar reaches the bottom of the page, another set of results instantly load up. Alternatively, there would be some sort of toolbar that would say 'Click here to see more results'. There is currently a similar setup in Google's 'Image Search'.
So, would this affect SEO or digital marketing, and if so, how? My first thought is that it would make rankings lower down in the SERPs more accessible because it requires less work from the searcher to reach them. On the other hand, it could be said that this will dilute the overall quality of the search results that Google produces because of the increased accessibility to less relevant results.
2. Wayback Machine-like functionality
The 'Wayback Machine' was a kind of digital time capsule that was used to store archived versions of webpages – it is still currently in beta format at www.waybackmachine.org . Several people suggested that a similar functionality could be implemented directly into Google as an additional service.
I think this feature would appease user curiosity more than it would offer any technical SEO value; however, there are still several things internet marketing professionals could use it for. Research, for instance, because it could be used to examine how competitor websites used to be structured and where they were getting their links from. So, while search engine optimisation value is limited, it could offer a few useful features to our industry.
3. Less emphasis on local search results
Quite a few people voiced dissent at the increasing number of Google Place's listings in the SERPs. Concerns were raised over Place's results being so open to manipulation from SEO black hatters and because they are so dependent on reviews, it has been suggested that some companies manufacture them.
Lots of companies work hard to rank highly in Google Place's listings and it's particularly important for smaller companies focusing on local SEO. However, if Google did choose to put less emphasis on local search (which I don't think they will), it would free up more room on the first page of Google results meaning that organisations with quality websites wouldn't suffer too badly. As I said, I don't think Google will place less emphasis on local search results, although perhaps they will come under closer scrutiny from Matt Cutts and his spam busters. I believe that the businesses investing in ethical local search will maintain high rankings and positive results.
While these are just a few suggestions taken from Matt Cutts original blog, there are loads of others that raise other interesting points about possible developments of Google and SEO in the future. If you have any suggestions you'd like to make why not leave a comment?
