The Google page result has changed… what about you?

I probably won’t teach you anything new by telling you that the Google result page has been in full metamorphosis for several months already. You can find there more and more video clips, pics, books, and news that push your site lower on the scale of results, to your increasing displeasure.

What can you expect? In many cases, Google has every interest to ensure that your site should not be the first accessed for a request.

• It prefers that this site be part of its properties (YouTube, Google Base, etc.), in order to generate traffic and, consequently, revenues for the latter.

• It would like you to purchase Adwords, because this is what generates 95 % of its revenues.

On the other hand, this change in the Google results page is visible, which renders Google a redoubtable, but visible adversary. The greatest changes that Google achieves currently are invisible … this is the real challenge. They render the work of any SEO specialist much more difficult, by distorting indicators that used to be reliable. Thus, several companies continue to offer their customers a positioning report indicating the position obtained in Google. What’s problematic is that these results are less and less reliable and could become completely useless within the space of a few years, mainly due to the fact that Google presents different results according to:

The place in which you are located

Indeed, a search carried out in Canada on Google.com for the request “restaurant” yields completely different results from those yielded by the same request made in the United States. This difference is understandable, it’s true, but what about the difference obtained when this search is carried out in Montreal versus Toronto, on the Plateau Mont-Royal versus Little Italy? Perhaps we have not yet reached this level, but we have strong reasons to bet that we shall be there very soon.

Personalization of your profile

More and more Google surfers have a Google identifier and obtain personalized results for their request. In this context, Google even launched “Google search wiki”, a few weeks ago, which enables surfers themselves to modify the results obtained and will probably soon permit you to modify the results of other surfers, if you are confident enough. This is another proof that Google wants to offer an ever-increasing personalization of its results.

Now that we know the challenge, what can we do about it? Here are a number of solution tracks:

Diversify your information sources

Rather than trust your Google positioning report, try to obtain results originating from countries and cities representing your target clientele. Thus, we use positioning indicators from several sources in order to obtain a more realistic idea as to the positioning of the site.

Use advanced tools for building your action plan

We use a multitude of free and chargeable tools in order to better understand the reason for which a site is better positioned in a certain place rather than in another and for discovering the changes to be made so as to improve its positioning. For example, the Linkscape tool detailed here permits not only an understanding of the links pointing toward your site, but also a finding of the links of your competitors, which probably enable them to position themselves better than you in a particular place.

Trust your data rather than those provided by external tools

The positioning data will become less and less useful in the coming years. Efforts should, therefore, be concentrated towards more reliable performance indicators originating directly from visits to your site, especially if you note a drastic change in visits originating from search engines. For example, it is possible to configure Google Analytics or other tools in order to keep informed on suspect changes in your organic traffic.