The Future of Google?

People love a bit of futurology. Guessing what’s coming up around the corner is fun. It can also lead to competitive advantage if its accurate (hint: it rarely is!) It’s not normally a game we engage in, but - strictly for fun - here’s our idea of where Google might be headed.

Google Will Measure How People use a Page - And Give New Content a Chance to Compete

"you can get good rankings in Google quite easily with new content"

Traditionally, well-established content is seen to to have an in-built advantage over new content in the search engine rankings. If you were the first person to write about welsh nose flutes, and you’ve kept the content in the same place, and some people have linked to it, then you’re pretty likely to be #1 for "welsh nose flutes" and various related terms.

Recently however, we’ve noticed that you can get good rankings in Google quite easily with new content on a well-established domain. What we also notice is that this effect is sometimes shortlived and the page disappears from the rankings as quickly as it came.

An example - and what we think it means

Our page on "Why Google Bought Youtube" was up very quickly when the deal was announced and appeared straight in the Google top 10 for a variety of phrases such as "why google bought youtube" "google buys youtube" and so on - often outranking sites like the BBC and CNN. This despite the fact that we can hardly claim to be experts on the matter of multi-billion dollar internet deals.

But - our stats (helpfully provided by Google) show that readers of this article spend on average over 3 minutes on this page. That suggests that most people like the page and stay to read the whole thing. The ’bounce rate’ (the percentage of people who click ’back’ after reading the page) is pretty high (over 90%) so it doesn’t keep people on the site, but the article itself is pretty interesting.

We think that Google knows damn well that people are staying on the page long enough to read it, and that consequently it’s worthy of lofty rankings for related terms - even without any noteworthy links or dedicated promotion.

With ever increasing numbers of people using Google Analytics on their site, Google will be getting more and more information about which content is keeping people interested and which is ’unnaturally high’ in the rankings.

We think it’s child’s play for Google to monitor how many clicks a particular result gets (how attractive the headline and description is), and how long it is before people click ’back’ to the results page (how well it looks and reads). New content will be given a chance at the top of the rankings, and these kind of metrics will determine whether it stays there or drops away over time.

Google Will Keep People on the Results Page for Longer

"…this keeps people looking at Google’s ads for longer - meaning more clicks… and more revenue for them"

Increasingly, Google is offering more than just a list of websites in its search engine results pages. Sometimes, thanks to the ’plus box’ companies’ contact details, share price and physical location are displayed alongside their listing. For example, see this result for "harrogate sulphur soap".

We think that Google knows that a lot of searches - especially for specific company names - are performed when people are looking for just those few details. By offering them as part of the main results page, they are saving users clicking through to the actual website in question and poking around to find those details.

Colour us cynical, but we can’t help but think that this also keeps people looking at Google’s ads for longer - meaning more clicks… and more revenue for them. In other words: Watch out for more of the same.

Links Will Get Less Important

We know that Google are coming down on paid links. That’s because they feel that people buying links from third parties is a kind of cheat (especially when it involves keyword anchor text on a content-rich page on a related site).

It can hardly have escaped their notice that people also use indirect methods such as online PR or linkbaiting to build links. Some backwater website selling car parts suddenly gets 2,000 new links in a week? Is that telling Google that the site in question is the best website for car parts on the web - or that someone’s doing some promotional work for them?

So what will Google do? We think it will award a temporary kick up the rankings. If the site is genuinely attractive to users - and not just boosted by linkbaiting - then it will attract new links at a more ’normal’ rate and the other factors such as the time people spend on the page will be positive. If the site is pretty rubbish (with the exception of the exciting linkbait page) then it doesn’t belong at the top of the rankings. Game over.

We think Google will increasingly try to use content quality as its prime indicator, and track visitor response ahead of mere link popularity as the key metric in its rankings.

Todays’ Moral

We could be wrong about everything above. But if you’re looking at a long-term strategy to position your website high in the rankings then it is always worth keeping a weather-eye on potential innovations that could affect your site’s performance.

If you’re website marketing isn’t thinking about what might be coming down the road, the potential implications for your website could be disastrous.