Thursday, February 5, 2009

Valentines Flowers & Google Doubling Up

Of interest, just 4 weeks ago the only search results showing in Google for the search phrase “Valentines flowers” were the Sponsored Ads and organic listings. As we moved into February, Google began inserting Google News and Shopping links directly into the search results. As search volumes have increased even more in the last 2 or 3 days, we now have Google Images showing in the results.

Google’s holiday algorithm clearly favors Google’s interests rather than searcher interests as links to Google News & Google Images & Google Shopping already exist at the very top-top of each and every search result. Hence, Google has double listings for Valentine’s Day which increases the level of SEO needed to rank organically as one of the top two domains. Ranking 3rd, while good, will miss much of the hurricane search volume as visually it appears as the 16th link when you count all the sponsored links, news links, image links, and shopping links that appear above the 3rd organic spot.

Can be quite annoying if you are the 3rd guy ;-)

No comments: