New School Year: Google 2009-10

Bad news. Good news?

Every August or September, Google seem to enjoy shaking everything around a little.*

In the last few weeks there has been a significant change to their organic search results algorithm – which basically means that a single domain can be returned multiple times for a keyword search on the first page. Malcolm Coles wrote about this last week.

And then at the top of the search engine result pages (or SERPs, if you speak in acronyms), there will be an equally severe adjustment in their paid search policy. Basically, Google used to protect brands by forbidding advertisers to use trademarked terms within their ad copies. Not anymore. From 14 September, resellers in the UK, Ireland and Canada will be able to use brand terms (iPhone, Easyjet, Nike and so on) in their adverts, pushing up their quality score, bringing down CPCs (costs per click) and generally making the whole thing much more competitive. There is a Net Media Planet blog on this (disclaimer – I work there) – if you want a little more detail.

Treated separately, both of these stories are interesting, newsworthy and will have consequences for advertisers and site traffic. Taken together, they add up to something of a little more.

Control of their trademarks gone, brands will lose out to resellers in the paid search listings. But if they do see their amount of paid search traffic drop, though, they will have the opportunity to claw it back by dominating the organic results. Google have taken with one hand and given back with the other.

Some thoughts:

• Paid search on profitable keywords/brands will become much more competitive and brands might well see sales impacted
• SEO Managers working for big brands will have the opportunity to dominate the first page of the organic search results for important keywords
• The user search experience might be affected. I suspect Google anticipate that the paid search results will compensate for the lack of variety further down the page. Will it?

So, these are a few of the changes to look forward to in the next few months. I’m sure that SEO’s will already be finding ways around these changes (they always do).

And, in the meantime, here’s a video about what might be coming next. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

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* Of course, Google is always changing, fiddling, tweaking and rattling about their algorithms. At certain times, though, their changes are more significant. See this article on their recent Mayday Change, and another on the famous Florida Update, back in the day.

Image Credit: Hans S on Flickr