Google Revamps SERPs, for Money?
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I guess it was bound to happen. Google has started to experiment with manipulating the organic results listings in order to find ways to earn additional revenue, as well as expand their service offerings to their users. Google has added things in the free results listings in the past, but this newest change has monumental impact on webmasters, and search engine marketers, as well as search engine optimization overall.
We have seen Google add local results listings, with the compass image to remind us the result is local to our vicinity. We have seen the implementation of Google Images added to search results, as well as Froogle shopping results, each of which has been unobtrusively added to the results page so as to not disrupt the user experience. This uninterupted user experience is what the company was built on.
There have been a few less subtle changes that have come along in the past few days that change the look of areas already touched by Google and redesigned into the SERP pages. There are now Book Results that are displayed based on the user query, provided by one specific sotre. After typing in a search for "cable TV,” I really did not see a book being relevant to my search query. After looking at the book title, understood what Google wants to do, which is, to offer me almost any choice of media I may be interested in, from one page.
Additionally on the paid side of Google, there is now a third link being added up top in the sponsored listings. I saw this when I searched for cable TV, so I didn't have to do too much research to find it.
Well there is no putting off the real reason I am writing and that, ladies and gentleman, is the organic results listings have been changed!
Funny as it may seem, I had posted in another SEO forum about a month ago that Google would need to further monetize the organic results listings now that they are a publicly held corporation. Charged with growing share value, the bean counters are hard at work looking for methods to earn additional revenue through the organic search results pages.
A few may not understand this, but when an accountant looks at the search engine results pages, he sees a money-losing proposition. Were it not for the pay per click ads, the expense Google would incur providing millions of pages of information for free would soon lead to financial disaster.
Typically, users do not search past the first three pages of results on any search engine, so the 100s and at times 1,000s of pages Google has behind these pages are a drain more than an asset. Indexing and providing them is a constant expense without as much reward as indexing the leading pages. Perhaps this move is designed to extend the pages searched through from 3 to 5 or 6.
Next: Shuffling Organic Results >>
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