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Cosmetic Changes at Google Precede Larger Overhaul
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
June 8, 2005
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Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short,
seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting
what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points
of the 3.5 part Bourbon
Update were installed last Monday. This update
has been staggered into three and a half sections in order to avoid a massive
amount of dislocation in established rankings as was seen in previous
major updates. While changes stemming from the Bourbon Update have
not
actually manifested into a full reordering of Google’s search engine
results pages (SERPs), many individual webmasters have reported fairly
significant losses or gains in ranking over the past few days.
There are dozens of factors behind changes at Google but the greatest is
the enormous valuation of the company itself. With share prices nearing
the $300 mark and current market capitalization topping $80billion, Google
is considered the most valuable media company in the world, surpassing the
$78billion value of Time-Warner and rising far above Yahoo’s estimated
value of $56billion. Most of Google’s riches are newly found, having
been generated after their August 2004 IPO. In their race to outlast, outperform
and outsmart their competitors, Google has changed its PR strategy and its
appearance to suit the legions of suits swirling in and out of their Mountain
View offices.
While money may move mountains, it takes a community to change an institution.
The search environment has changed substantially over the past three years
and in that time, every major player in the search sector has changed as
well. Today, Google has become a lot more complicated, so much so that it
has stopped trying to look simple. This change in corporate attitude is
best reflected in two places, the homepage and the About Google section.
Google’s homepage used to be quite simple. Recently, Google created
a personalized portal interface google.com/ig offering users instant access
to several of these new features. For folks with Google accounts such as
Gmail users, subscribers to Google Groups, Google desktop users and other
account holders, personalized versions of the once sparse homepage now presents
instant entry points to the various applications the individual uses. Many
industry observers have suggested Google’s adoption of so many new
features and an all-in-one interface show they are moving towards presenting
themselves as more of a portal like Yahoo or MSN. Google has always been
a bit different than its competition. Even when borrowing and innovating
on competitors’ ideas, Google has, until now at least, managed to
keep itself at an arm’s length from the mainstream in appearance and
operation. The maintenance of that image gave Internet users an alternative
view of Google, one that propelled Google to a position of almost total
dominance of the search engine sector. While that dominance might have slipped
over the past year, Google is still the most popular search appliance in
the world.
One of the ways Google has acted differently than others is in the appearance
of not taking itself too seriously. Its corporate ethics policy was limited
to the three word phrase, “Don’t be evil”. Its front page
interface retains the double-entendre induced “I feel lucky” button,
even though the button is rarely used. The prospectus issued during their
August 2004 IPO was specifically written to appear idealistically anti-corporate.
Since its introduction, Google has practiced projecting a simple, youthful
image that required very little in the way of explanation, so long as their
search engine lived up to users’ expectations.
Google strives to live up to user expectations and, for the most part,
has met and exceeded them time and time again. There is one long-held expectation
that Google may not be able to live up to any longer though. Many of us
assume Google’s relatively informal public attitude will continue
to carry over into the later part of the decade. It won’t. By comparison,
Google will almost certainly continue to be perceived as the search engine
driven by youthful energy. Whenever competitors such as MSN or Yahoo try
to appear as down-to-Earth as Google does, their efforts seem obvious and
forced. Does anyone remember that poor-fellow in the butterfly suit wandering
aimlessly around New York last year? Google’s communication style
is maturing and the best place to view these changes is on the About Google
section of their site.
Google has published information about itself on pages found behind the “About
Google” link for several years. While documents found in the About
section have never been totally static, a facelift over the past few weeks
has radically altered the look and feel of the section. Along with the traditional
organic search engine results and highly targeted paid-ads, Google is actually
a series of 30-someodd search-based applications ranging from alerts and
answers to wireless search and weather information. Driven in part by an
inventive entrepreneurial spirit and in part by a desire to keep up with
products offered by competitors, Google has been rapidly adding new features
and tools to their core search service for the past three years.
Google’s About Google page was once much smaller than it is today.
It has grown slightly larger every time Google adds another offering to
it. The biggest changes are found behind the increasing number of links
on the About page. Today’s version of the About page has five boxes
added to the left hand side of the page advertising Google
Desktop, Blogger,
Google Code, Google
Mobile, and My
Search History. In the center column,
Google continues to show four main site sections labeled, Our Search, For
Site Owners, Our Company, and More Google. Collectively, those sections
contain a larger number of links than they did previously and the number
of documents found behind those links has grown as well. Serious Google
users should take an hour or two to tour these changes and learn more about
the staggering range of features, services and search-enhancements Google
now offers.
For webmasters and SEOs, an examination of the new Google Webmaster Guidelines
is a definite must. Google has recently changed its webmaster guidelines
which are also considered to be a primer on “ethical SEO” practices
in relation to Google placements. Google has recently updated its webmaster
guidelines to include information on “supplemental listings”,
crawling frequencies and prefetching. Google has also posted information
on its new Google
Sitemaps experiment.
Google
Sitemaps is perhaps the most important new feature for SEOs offered
by Google in a long time. Said to be an experiment in spidering, Google
Sitemaps invites webmasters to feed site data directly to Google through
an XML sitemap page. Webmasters and SEOs can now tell Google exactly which
sections of their sites to crawl, and providing they are keeping their XML
sitemap current, when and where to look for changes to their sites. This
experimental initiative will especially help webmasters working with database
driven sites or large Ecommerce sites where documents are subject to frequent
change and are often found behind long-string URLs. Google has been kind
enough to provide detailed information on establishing an XML feed and setting
priorities for Googlebot.
As it grows, Google appears to be running into the same problem other webmasters
with numerous sites or services encounter, the rapid dilution of a domain’s
unique topic focus. In order to keep themselves accessible, understandable
and relevant, Google’s teams of engineers, programmers and public
relations specialists are involved in what appears to be a massive overhaul
of the interface, public documents and the basic sorting algorithm that
produces organic results. As in previous years, how this all plays out in
the end is entirely up to the searching public. From the SEO/SEM perspective,
it is a good thing Google is in the midst of this update. Web workers have
been demanding a greater degree of transparency from Google for some time
now and perhaps these updates are the beginning of a new commitment to communication
from the Googleplex.
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