Real time search has been rolled out across Google this week, and although the search feature won’t apply to all searches and instead only work with ‘trended’ topics that are likely to take advantage of the feature, SEO companies and brands need to take note of the changes.
Searching in real time involves searching for a topic as normal, but rather than Google feeding back the most relevant static websites, it first puts a box at the top of the page which provides up to the second searches from sites such as Twitter, Yahoo! Answers and other instant social media sites. It’s promised networking sites like Facebook and Myspace will be included at a late date, too.
Real time search is another result of the continued feature war between Bing and Google. Bing has also has a similar service that covers a wider range of topics, but it’s relatively small online usage means it doesn’t affect SEO in the same way that Google’s decision has done.
The most immediate thing that real time searches are going to do in terms of SEO is to push the traditional searches down the page. As it updates every few seconds, the real time search box will continuously draw the reader back up towards the top of the page rather than the traditional ‘top 10’ links.
But the search could also have wider reaching implications for branding. No longer will negative search results be a case of clicking away to another site to read about faults or poor service – they’ll instead by right on the front page and visible for everyone to see. Brands will need to invest a lot of time and effort into reputation management as Twitter breaks out from relatively small audience to the entire population of Google users.
The good news is that SEO is still just as important as ever and nothing is likely to change that for as long we use search engines – it’s just another part of SEO that will need to be considered. Google also seems to have some intelligent filtering and authority metrics going on behind the scenes so at least all results should be relevant, too.
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