evilgreenmonkey

I’ve been moaning to people about this for a while, although as it still hasn’t been fixed I thought I’d shout a bit louder.

I’ve recently bought a house in mighty Essex and currently pondering over whether to buy a car or not (I never needed one when living in Central London). As a result, I’ve been running searches for terms like [mortgages] and [cars]. For both of these terms, Google Universal kicks in and displays news results, which is totally understandable. What I don’t get is why they insist on showing US news for searches that clearly require domestic information.

Google already knows that if I’m searching for these terms, I’m only going to be interested in information relevant to me - so why bother showing me stuff that I’m never going to click on? I don’t want news about Bush screwing up the US economy even further, or that the Hummer now comes in Lavender Blue. I do want to know what’s happening to the Bank of England base rate and that I should hold off from buying a Mini until a new model is released in the UK next year.

Please stop showing me news results from New York Times or Wall Street Journal; I’m on a UK IP address, with a en-GB browser and searching via Google.co.uk - why on earth would these sources be of interest to me on these terms? It’s understandable for terms such as [poker], where global news is more relevant, but at least stick in a filter that thinks before it sticks “Paulson Says Housing Woes to Worsen” on the first page of UK mortgage results.

It’s this year’s buzzword and the topic that every search conference goer is talking about, although most people are still unsure about what Universal Search is and how it affects them. The term is used by Google to describe their rollout of a new search result format, combining maps, images, video, news, products and blogs into the main search listings.

Although Google has been offering this data via its “OneBox” for a number of years now, the new format will actually integrate the new data sources into the web search listings. It effectively means that a website ranking 9th or 10th in the web results for a term, could get pushed onto the second page by a video clip or news article outranking them in the new result set.

Google thinks that this new style of results will be more helpful for the searcher and will show them information that they may not have thought to look for otherwise. It’s not surprising that the overall take up of Blog Search and News Search has been slow since launch, with the average Google user only knowing how to use the main search box and rarely venturing onto the other search tabs. The new result set will neglect the need to actively seek out these features, helping a user to find what they want first time. It’s important that the roll-out is carried out correctly however, which is why the process has been a gradual one. Someone searching for car prices doesn’t want to see an image of the vehicle and you don’t expect to see a blog result when seeking professional medical advice. The algorithm needs to determine which data sources are most appropriate for each topic, which is where search and click data will most likely play an important role.

How does this affect your company? Firstly you may find that you web page rankings drop as a result of other content sources outranking them. Listings for images, news and video, also take up more screen space than a normal web listing, so your 5th position ranking may now require the user to scroll down in order to see it.

Other than trying to increase your rankings for key terms, your best defence is to try and get your content included in the various new search types. If your company builds or manufactures a product, remember to use the product make and model as the file name on images and to use “alt” attributes in your <img> tag to describe the product. Keep your company blog up to date and remember to add Google to your list of search providers to ping. Keep an archive of your press releases and publish industry news in order to get into Google News. Demonstrate and promote your products using vodcasts (video podcasts) and upload them to YouTube. As with web pages, it’s important to build links to your content, images and video in order to increase its perceived popularity. This is often a much easier task than with web pages, as the medium has only recently started to be promoted in this fashion. Just because your web ranking may drop, doesn’t mean that your other content can’t be number one. Universal Search is here to stay and will be the default search result format for all Google users. It is important to embrace the issues and opportunities now in order to stay in front of your competitors.

My New Years resolution for 2007 was to become a published author, with the thought of writing an SEO book which tackles search from the corporate and in-house point of view. This idea fell by the wayside when several friends in the industry also announced similar intentions (although with different angles and subjects).

The book which I was planning would not just cover the basic Best Practice areas, but also tackle issues such as Black Hat SEO and dealing with agency bullshit. I’ve worked with some of the biggest brands on the web, and really think that there’s still a lot to be learnt when dealing with corporate websites.

Would you read such a book, and should I follow my ambitions?