Google’s latest algorithm change, which has rather amusingly been dubbed the ‘Parton Update’ by one commentator, should start to impact search rankings for websites that show more than enough (whatever this means) advertising ‘above-the-fold’ – mainly, it seems, to encourage webmasters to reduce the quantity of advertising higher up the page – in an effort to improve the visitor’s experience.
It is unclear, as has been noted in the comments section of Google’s Webmaster Blog post, what exactly ‘above-the-fold’ means (what screen resolution are you using?), which types of ad content will be penalised (advertorial, banners, Google AdSense?) and how much weight Google’s algorithm will give to this tweak. The exact metrics are unknown and will likely remain so, as is Google’s prerogative.
What is also slightly worrying is Google’s use of the phrase ‘actual content’. A pedant would suggest that everything on a website is ‘content’ – in which case, where does this leave us?
Google hypocricy?
Nowhere that we could call ‘obvious’ except for the familiar cries of ‘Google is behaving like a hypocrite’ (Read Aaron Wall’s post from December last year, you’ll see what I mean).
However, it could be said that the online marketing industry has made a rod for its own back and that it’s no good blaming Google – after all, there are other search engines which users can choose if they so desire. But they (we) don’t. Why? To find out part of the reason why, we need to change heads like a familiar children’s story’s scarecrow – we need to do a ‘Worzel’.
What we see as normal Internet users
If I remove my online marketing head Worzel Gummidge style and replace it with the head of a ‘normal’ person (our target audience and customers), it comes as a great surprise to find that I suddenly believe Google is ‘the Internet’ (rightly or wrongly), develop an utter loathing for websites that are plastered in advertising, huge banners and meaningless slogans and scorn at websites that make me hunt for contact details, the small-print and pricing information. Combine this with a navigation styled around Hampton Court’s maze, anything Flash related and domains incomprehensibly named in a ‘web 2.0’ style (like wonkledonkle.com) – and my World Wide Web experience is irrefutably ruined.
This is because with my new Worzel Gummidge head on, I realise that I’m not searching for a mass of random advertising through the quagmire of online noise - instead, I’m searching for something specific. So, in the same way that I don’t watch natural history TV programmes about the mating ritual of snow leopards in the hope that I might be presented with details of where I can purchase a half price sofa during the all important moment of feline conception, I don’t use the Internet to learn about how to get a 30 day free trial of WonkleDonkle Pro when I’m looking for information about the history of Buckingham Palace. It’s quite simple really.
It’s all in the idea
The very idea of cleaning up search results (which Google ‘says’ its Panda updates and recent changes support) by encouraging webmasters to improve website quality and by presenting online advertising in relevant and thoughtfully positioned ways, can only make online businesses more successful by improving the user/customer experience they offer. That much is true.
It would seem that no matter what happens to online marketing in the next few years; only the very best integrated digital propositions will survive, even if Google’s own search results are biased and overtly commercialised (as Aaron Wall suggests).
This is important. With the majority of the Western world relying on Google as its window to the World Wide Web, relying on ‘traditional’ online marketing disciplines alone to gain market share through prominence in Google (such as SEO and PPC) could be considered as an extremely risky strategy. All your eggs in one basket etc.
Interactive, interchangeable and integrated
To compete in a commercialised digital world, the default position for every business or organisation (not just large corporations who are doing this already) should be to build fully integrated digital marketing campaigns using online digital real estate to support them. This could of course include websites, mobile and tablet applications or social media (and no doubt some other, as yet unknown, platforms for customer and Internet user interaction). And it needn’t cost the Earth – just a little ‘joined up thinking’.
Perhaps then there’s little use complaining about Google and its many seemingly contradictory positions and announcements. Remember, Worzel Gummidge was the scarecrow with a head for every situation. Worzel was prepared. Today’s digital marketing strategies should be the same; interactive, interchangeable and fully integrated.
This way, when Google moves the goal-posts, businesses that survive will have done so because they will have erected their own goal-posts to compensate.
