Future search engine trend

Summary:

Matt's answer:

That’s a great question. There’s a lot of really interesting things going on in search right now. Even if you check Techmeme today, there’s […]

[…] Well, I’m browsing through Techmeme, and McDonalds hacked, customer data stolen, Gawker hacked, you know, and McDonald’s data… WikiLeaks also? I have no idea how all these hacks work. So you know, so one thing we’ve been working on, that’s on our radar, is working on trying to help hacked sites. You know, we’ve been spending a fair amount of time on that. We’re increasing messaging. The other big thing on our radar is probably communication. So how do you let people know that they’ve got an issue? How do you communicate so that if they want to do a reconsideration request, you know, can we give them some more information? Are they doing better? Are they doing worse? All that sort of stuff.

You’ve been doing things like sending out e-mails to people, of course, when you detect problems with their site. If you can figure out what their email is. Yes. And sometimes we’ve tried from the site, and more recently, we’re trying to get people to opt in in the Webmaster Console, so that they will get e-mail alerts. And we’re really trying get a lot of people to opt in to that. Because, you know, if we’ve told you that your site is hacked, and you don’t get the e-mail we send you, that doesn’t do anybody any good. So we’ll keep doing that. We’ll keep pressing on the reconsideration request process, trying to make that more transparent. But I’m kind of curious. Like, what’s on your radar? What do you think the big trends are? What are you thinking about?

I’ve been especially watching the social stuff. You know, we’ve had all this social data being used, or we’ve had all this social data being generated, and I’ve been curious recently, would the search engines actually be using it. And you know, it’s interesting that Google was saying, yes, we’re actually looking at things like, who you are on Twitter, and who follows you, what your kind of Twitter reputation is, and your tweet rank, if you will. And that can have an influence on whether or not the things that you’re talking about or linking to are doing well. So it’s been interesting to see how we’re evolving from, it’s just that your website might have a reputation, to you yourself might have a reputation on a social network.

And it’s only a matter of time before we see people coming up with triangular follow on Twitter, It would never happen. Reciprocal follow, all that kind of stuff. This is all mythical stuff. It would never happen. Well, actually, and we did have a question earlier today. Is there anything you’d like to correct yourself on? Because we filmed some videos back in May, and we said, oh no, you know, Twitter is just like any other webpage, Facebook is just like any other webpage. And so we made a video earlier today that said, hey, that’s no longer the case. And I think we’ll leave a link to the Search Engine Land article, because that’s the most comprehensive one. That would be great. And no need to follow that or anything. Because it’s editorially deficient, and, But no, it absolutely is the case, that even earlier today, someone was asking about, if you were a big company, and thinking about advanced SEO, what would you do? And we were thinking, optimize for your speed, make sure your CMS is there, make sure you have buy-in. And then we were like, well, also social media marketing.

Social media marketing drives traffic, not only links

The other interesting thing was, you know, this change with the online merchants. And your reputation as an online merchant, independent of your webpage and your page rank or whatever, is now something that Google is taking into account. And that seemed to be a good move, in many ways.

Well, and it took a little while, that you know, we had to see what was going on, and then we have to educate people. It wasn’t just complaints on consumer sites, you know, consumer complaint sites. But it’s definitely the case that if you make a bad reputation for yourself, that can follow you around on the web. And so I think more people are going to be thinking about, you know, what is my reputation, how do I show myself in the best possible light?

SEO can be really handy, to highlight the good things that you do

When that happened, I saw a lot of people say things like, well, now everybody is just going to create a bunch of fake reviews, or good reviews, and try to push that up. And my assumption had been, that may be one of the signals you might be using, but you would be taking into account a whole variety of other things, as well. So it’s not just, well, this person has a bunch of bad reviews, therefore they must be bad. But you try to… Absolutely.

And so, what we ended up doing, was taking multiple data sources, and intersecting them, so that if one had a false negative, you know, the other data source wouldn’t have that false negative. And I think that that works relatively well, so that if somebody thinks, oh, I’m just going to hurt a competitor, I’m just going to go do a whole bunch of things right here, well, they’re not going to think about all the different ways that we’re looking at the signals. So the hopefully good thing, is that the merchants who do not provide a good user experience, our algorithm, it hits over 500 different sites, you know, as far as triggering. That that’s going to, hopefully, capture the right sort of sites, that people don’t really want to be visiting on the internet, at least according to our algorithms. Great. That’s a lot of trends. Yeah. Thanks for stopping by! Thanks for having me. Good questions.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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