Google Revamps SERPs, for Money? - Why Would Google Change Free SERPs?
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A few of us in the SEM industry such as ClickZ and MediaPost felt this move was a commercial one, and others took exception with this stance. They said it was strictly for added user value. It is truly amazing how businessmen with major revenue producing websites can look at Google and see everything as a user enhancement...as if Google doesn't need to earn revenue. Come on people! Wake up! Returning SERPs that the user did not request is not user enhancement by any imagination; it's manipulation.
I was told I was wrong by one of the elder SEO statesmen in the industry, over at SEW Forums, only to have him come back and post Google’s own admittance in the next post. Even he admitted that there was a commercial aspect behind it.
Google is testing an automated technique for detecting when an alternate query might help users find what they are looking for more quickly. For these searches, which are both commercial and non-commercial in nature, Google displays one or more alternate queries together with a preview of their top results
The most glaring example of the commercial aspect is found when doing a search for “on demand” as the keyword term. Using that search term, we now see results in positions 6, 7, and 8 replaced by three (3) different results listings for Comcast Cable Corp.
Unlike piggy bank used above, the results returned in the referral do not exist in positions 1, 2, or 3 when doing searches for on demand services, on demand listings, on demand shows, on demand programs, on demand time, and others.
Search engine marketers and SEO specialists, pay attention. For a number of keywords, this means that trying to be in Google's top 10 is out of the question. Google has turned a fair goal like that into needing to be in rank 5 or higher to get noticed for sure. Any lower than that, and Google users may not see you. If results 6 through 8 are replaced, this could distract users into shrugging off the rest of the results as less relevant. Or they may scan subsequent pages and just not bother looking at results 5-10. We have yet to see how this changes matters, but it sure is going to alter how everyone reads the Google results.
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