Natural Search &
Online Tourism Consultant

Google today announced a new feature designed to give people greater control over the results they see. Do you think a lower ranked result is more useful? It’s easy to promote it to the top, delete a result you’re not interested in, or comment on results.

This is the logical next step in the evolution of Google as far as I’m concerned. Their algorithm has been tweaked until it can’t be tweaked any more without getting dynamic, on the fly, user interaction to help it be even more targeted and to develop further. And here it is…Google SearchWiki.

Now you can customise your search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. You can also see how other other searchers have customised any given result.

You’ll see the changes you make whenever you do the same searches while signed in to your Google Account, or until you decide to undo them. The changes you make only affect your own search results , and your changes will be included on a public comments page where you can also view how the community has edited or commented on a set of results.

Will this go to impacting on the natural search listings long term…in my opinion yes!

What importance should be put on the category that Google defines your website in? If you take the Google Ad Planner it categorises a website in a given category related to your sector. Are you unlikely to rank against what you perceive to be a close competitor but to what Google sees as although industry related, unrelated to the niche you would ideally like to be in?

These categories are not only used in Google’s Ad Planner but surface in Google Analytics under benchmarking and also surface in Google Insight in exactly the same format. I recently interviewed a candidate for an SEO role who had worked for Google in India…she stated that she manually vetted sites before they went into the index…I wish I had asked her if some kind of categorisation was taking place or if this was her primary role in the entry process.

There is inevitably going to be websites which straddle categories and see competitors outranking them on a term they feel strongly on. Does this categorisation have an impact on what you can realistically rank for in the SERPS?