In 2010, Google unveiled a long list of upgrades to its signature search engine services. And those upgrades have amounted to a pretty big game-changer for search engine marketers and SEO engineers worldwide.
Or did they? A recent report indicates that Google Instant, one of last year’s upgrades in which Google.com offers results instantly as the visitor is typing, hasn’t changed SEO at all.
Jake Hird, a research analyst at the Econsultancy digital marketing community, said “that it looks like the introduction of Instant was to improve user experience, not change the way pages are listed,” per Hostway.
“We just put out our SEO [search engine optimisation] buyers guide and although it is something to be aware of, it doesn’t actually change how the algorithms rank pages, that’s the key point that a lot of people overlook sadly,” Hird said in the report.
That’s just one report, though, and it’s a bit hard to swallow as the whole truth. Other reports maintain that Google Instant has had detrimental effects on long-tail SEO by offering results to customers before they’ve even finished typing the first search word.
And, according to other figures, a whopping 98 percent of Google users choose to use Google Instant. That means that the vast, vast majority of web users are participating in Google Instant. Almost everyone, in other words.
Then again, Google Instant is the sort of algorithm that’s hard to measure, in terms of how it affects SEO. Introduced only five months ago, and during a year that also saw the introduction of Google Caffeine and more personalized Google searches, it’s hard to pinpoint what changes affect what rankings in what way.
Casino affiliates, what have your experiences been?