Google Instant Preview

The big G has launched the new Instant Preview feature a week or so ago.  Basically it gives you a small screenshot of search result with the search term highlighted within the image for your viewing pleasure.

Although quite a nifty little feature, there's a few questions being raised from an SEO point of view.

Firstly, if searchers can preview your page before deciding to click through, does this impact on the number of visits that you'd normally receive?  We're assuming that normally a person would click on the link, then quickly scan your site before deciding to bounce away if they haven't found what they're looking for.

Now they're essentially making up their mind about the result based on a partial screen cap of your site.

Secondly, by displaying the tiny screen cap, will searchers be more likely to be making up their mind on whether to visit your site based on its design?  Will it be a case of design over relevance?  Following that train of thought, will site owners now be more likely to try to optimise their site for Page Preview display?

Should we be spending our time browsing search results or browsing the actual result pages?  Is Google now trying to own the entire search experience?

Food for thought...

Google Caffeine

Given that Google has today announced it's new enhancements to it's search algorithm, which are aimed at giving search results up to 70 percent fresher than the current batch, I thought it a good idea to look at what the main changes are.


The following points are some that I've collated from various sources around the traps discussing this right now.

Fast Indexing
With the introduction of Google Caffeine, there will be no more “sandbox”. The indexing time frame is down to about 15 minutes now if you have a dynamic sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools. This means that unique, steady content will take even more precedence in search engine rankings.

Load Time
Matt Cutts stated in November 2009 that many engineers in Google are making the argument that the “load time” of a web page be included in the algorithm of Google. So, we know that they have been working on this. Make sure that your images and all page elements are optimised and that your sites load fast. Nobody wants to lose ranks because of this.

Flash Sites
Based on the information above, this is bad news for Flash sites because they take forever to load. Do not expect to rank high with full flash sites.

Paid Links and Age of Link
No more buying links to push ranks up in a short period of time! Google says that the age of links matter and stable links will get you up in the SERPs. So, if you plan on buying links, make sure you keep them for at least 8-12 months. That can be a bit costly, we still recommend building naturally occurring links.

Analytics Data
As controversial as this is, Google might use the analytics data of webmasters in their algorithm due to the fact that it provides a huge amount of information about user interaction of a web site. 

Keywords
The new Google seems to rely a lot more on keyword strings to bring better, more relevant results.  This makes the SEO's jobs a little more difficult.

In essence, it seems to mean that many SEO related businesses - and those that are still involved in search arbitrage, may have to re-evaluate how they go about doing whatever it is they do...  The improvements are definitely more geared towards the user experience rather than making life easier for the marketer.

How it should be i think :)

For more, check out Mashable's detailed test of the new algorithm.