Janric Website Design

I was reading a report last night about the current and expected changes that are taking place to the search engine Google and how it will be changing. The fact is that Google’s method of producing search results never sits still. It changes regularly to keep ahead of self confessed search engine experts trying to force their sites further up the lists. So what do people think is in store in the current changes?

What was interesting was that this report described that Google would make changes at the start of January and during the middle of January, followed by some towards he end of the month or into February. Why is this interesting? Well at the beginning of the month one of my own financial websites shot from page five of Google to second spot on the first page. It held that position for exactly two weeks before returning to page five.  I had done nothing much in that time to cause that sudden promotion and then the following demotion, so I guessed there was a Google change afoot somewhere that had caused it.

What will happen in the anticipated third change I cannot guess. I know what I would like to happen though!

So what is it expected that Google will be doing differently this year over previous years? Well services such as Twitter are growing at a huge rate. Users of these services have access to a wealth of micro blogging as it is known – small snippets of information. If something happens, it can be all around the Twitter service in no time. Want to research it? Look and see what other people are saying about it on Twitter. Some are bound to have linked into further useful news reports and it is these very useful extra links that people are more likely to forward onto their own friends, retweets as they are known.

This means that another service could be competing against all of the search engines for a slice of the action on certain searches. So what is Google’s likely natural reaction? Surely it would be to jump in and join the fun? After all, if you can’t beat them, join them? Google is expected to start trawling services such as Twitter a lot more often than it has been.

This will mean giving higher page rank to services such as Twitter, after all, frequency of visits to given websites and their page rank go hand in hand. Low page rank pages are visited rarely, high page rank pages daily.

And the reaction to the success of Twitter looks like in the future Google might just be visiting Twitter more often. Maybe even gathering Tweets in real time. Sound daft? No, using the so called ping service search engines can be notified when a new blog post is published and can then pick up that post very quickly, within hours I have seen in the past. So why not Twitter?

It would mean a whole load of data gathering for the search engine, but that is what Google likes – collecting data. So what does this mean for those of us who have businesses and livelihoods that depend on Twitter? We’ll look at that in the next part!