An interesting article about planned Google changes here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/201...hings-not.html
and a review by the Telegraph (as a consumer perspective) here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...t-answers.html
The move (not just Google) is towards search engine results which answer your need - not just guide you to the website...
i.e. the search engines want to pull enough information from your site to mean that the web user doesn't need to come to visit you - they will get their answer within Google and move on...
This has some interesting implications:
- will providing structured authoritative data make you attractive to the search engines?
- how do you provide the precise balance of content to make you attractive to a search engine wanting to provide the complete answer - give the viewer the impression that you know what you are talking about - but still leave something untapped so that they need to visit you...
precise website content will become very critical
perhaps you will need two layers of information - one for the search engines and a second 'restrcited' section not available to them, but viewable by humans - how do you do that without cloaking (penalised by SE) or complex coding?
There is a definite trend from guide to answer - much in the same way that Facebook would like to be the internet - so would Google et al... both approaches are doing it with your content - they have nothing without the content providers - but they want to then strip you out of the profitable bit - building a relationship with the user...
perhaps it is time to decide whether we want our content to build their solutions?
Alasdair
Merged this post into this thread as it is on a related topic - but this thread is more suited as host thread...
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