Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubyrescue | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if this was covered elsewhere, but this actually changes the SEO game in a subtle way. imagine you could rank for the term online deg but NOT online degree.

SEO's rejoice, this could be profitable for consultants and linkbuilders.

View on HN

Did you try it? It doesn't search for the current search term, it searches for its current best guess. The instant search results for "online deg" and "online degree" are identical, because it's the same search. (I compared it to a direct search for "online deg" and it's not the same search.) There's no optimization for "online deg" to be made.

I don't think there's very much SEO implication here at all, actually, as the goal was already to be the top hit for a common Google search, and common Google searches will be what Google Instant already prefers.

i did, and i thought about your objection, but then i thought, nobody is trying to rank for online deg yet... what if they did?

for example, just type 'degree ' (make sure there's a space - you get results for "degree symbol" (or at least I do) - now all i have to do is rank for "degree symbol" and put links to my online degree affiliate links...

there are certainly keyword results that are a) in autocomplete, b) substrings of keyword results also in autocomplete, c) easier to rank for than the longer phrase.

I think topic-modeling (a la the Latent Dirichlet Allocation article posted about seomoz the other day) will make this difficult to do (at least without confusing the people you want to convert).

Actually there is a big section of the SEO world that focuses on the long tail keywords. This change is going to harm those folks, but up the reward for anyone that does rank highly for the frequently used terms. Good and bad, hopefully this will lead to less spammy junk, but also reduces the amount of real estate available for new entrants (or at least makes it more pricey).

In the live webcast they said that they use auto-complete to populate the instant results. Typing "online deg" auto-completes to "online degrees", so that's the query used to generate the instant results.

"online deg" probably isn't the best example, but there are still going to be cases where a prefix autocompletes to a different target than the final intended search, that SEOs for the final intended search will want to start ranking more highly for. Finding those cases will be part of the fun.

Ask it another way: do you think a service that shows what the current google autocompletions are for every prefix of a given term becomes more or less interesting to SEOs after this announcement?

no - but I thought a really good example was when I typed in HAHA and saw that one of the options presented was:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I clicked on it because it was so much funnier than the rest of them.

Turns out: affiliate link.

Or some sort of americanized japanese dating porn or something ... couldn't really tell.

Still. I definitely agree that it completely changes the SEO game.

I think what ruby above is saying is that with enough websites, urls and content, an SEO attack could turn 'online deg' into a valid keyword.

Google auto-completes brands and keywords that only have 2 or 3 website references (I know of a site in stealth and I just tried it, and it worked. Google has indexed their homepage and title, and as I typed it in it auto-completed their name, with only a single website to reference).

"an SEO attack could turn 'online deg' into a valid keyword."

If you have that much power, you probably have a better way to spend it. Also I would bet that suggest keywords come from user searches themeselves, not the web. That's why I suspect the impact of this is probably relatively minimal.

Call me crazy, but I think Google just might have considered the SEO impact before deploying this. If it's not literally on a checklist somewhere for deployment of search features, I'd be stunned.

I like the idea that it's the same search for both - think about the number of terms that would bring back adult content based on the prefix, but given the entire term, are something entirely innocent.

I'm curious if users will actually change their behavior because of this though.

For example, if you decide you want to go to google.com to search for "online degree", are you likely going to stop in the middle of typing your phrase when you notice some results appear?

For me the lag between typing and displaying of results seems a little too slow for this to really happen.

Sure, if you can touch type. There's still millions of people hunting and pecking, especially on mobile devices. It's certainly plausible that people will stop to look at the results.

You forget that you are not the user.

edit: ie not everyone is typing as quickly as you are

One of the articles I read talked about Google mentioning this....their research showed an average pause of 300ms between keystrokes (crazy!) but only 30ms between eye saccades, so users are looking around 10 times for every keystroke.

If I'm hunting and pecking, I'm looking at the keyboard, not the screen. Those saccades are most likely happening during the typist's search for the next key to hit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com