Nick Garner's Blog

Hmm, thats interesting Teddie

I was on a speaking gig the other night and the title of the talk was ‘Search is Dead, Long Live Search‘. So I was up with:
Ciar?n Norris – Head of Social Marketing & Director, Invention at MindShare (social media)
Teddie Cowell ? SEO Director, Guava (SEO agency)
William Tunstall-Pedoe ? CEO & Founder, True Knowledge
Alan Patrick – Consultant,Broadsight
CHAIR: Jon Myers – Head of Search / Associate Director, MediaVest

I've got something important to say!

My big theme was around how Caffeine ( yes that one again ) is going to change the landscape where spamming is going to get tougher and tougher. Along with that will come the split out between:

- Boring commercial brand owned stuff that users don’t particularly want to look (you pay for prominence via PPC)

- Interesting stuff written by individuals about those boring brands, where they help makes sense of what is the best consumer wise. (you have to have something interesting to say & be on the consumer side as a brand)

For anyone not familiar with the BIG idea, it comes from a site called cluetrain.com where they say ‘markets are conversations’. Think of amazon and its reviews, then think ‘web wide’ where forums and ‘real conversations’ happen and imagine Google filtering the results so you get those ‘conversations’.

An interesting screen grab:

Its that red box!

So from trying a few searches, the multi links are still generally at the bottom of the page, but assuming users like this stuff, you will see that block rising and you will see stuff like this crowd out the ranking where the ‘brand sites’ used to live.

If you think its my imagination, check this post on the google glog talking about this new kind of forum block.

On the general theme of the commercial index being eroded by informational listings, check this: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=casino

(screengrab below)

It's the red box again!

To wrap up:

Here is my message from the Chinwag night. “If you are a boring brand, or not that clever with ‘social engineering’ I.e. creating a footprint so Google thinks your site is important to their users – then you will pay dearly through PPC. ”

And lest you forget, Google is a public company and so is only interested in sustainable maximisation of profits.

By the way, I do think there is a BIG future for SEO with Google, but it will take a very different route than the hack/spam route we hear so much about. And honestly I’m only beginning to really figure it out.

Related posts:

1. More google goodies !