Has the new user interface affected your traffic? For better or for worse? Tell us.

Opportunities

WebProNews spoke with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, at Google I/O recently. He talked a bit about the new Google SERP redesign, and the opportunities it creates for businesses to reach users beyond that one "trophy phrase".

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"The trick – the thing that’s really important – is that it’s different depending on what you’re searching for," he says. "So if you’re searching for Tom Cruise, you’re more likely to see images and options for the different types of image search – you can say, ‘show me the color images’ or ‘show me the large images’, whereas if you’re searching for Obama, you’re more likely to get real-time results, and updates, and stuff like that. So, what I like about it it is it surfaces more ways to slice and dice your data, and even if you’re not a power user, if you’ve got those options on the left-hand side, you’re more likely to kind of try to explore a little more. So that’s a good opportunity for webmasters and SEOs. You know, you don’t have to be number one. Maybe you can be number one in a slightly different area that people will find by exploring."

"Some people get really obsessed with their one trophy phrase, or their one number one ranking, for their number one web search, and they don’t think about things like image search or video search, blog search, or book search – you know, people, it’s not that hard to write a book," he continues. "It can be done. And people also tend to think about search engines, when they might want to think about social media – things like Twitter, things like Facebook…because you want to go where the people are. And people aren’t ONLY searching. They’re hanging out online. You know, they’re on forums. So I think a lot of the time, you can think about ‘where can I show up besides just number one? What are the phrases people are gonna type in that show buying intent’ – where they really would like to get your product? And if you’re paying attention to those sorts of areas, and not just the trophy phrases, then you can find a lot more opportunities."

Matt also talks a little more about the new UI and the speed of which Google indexes content here.

Which of the options available in the new user interface have you found most helpful? Share your thoughts.

Where Freshness Comes In

One of the most important elements of this new user interface is the time filter – you can filter results by anytime, latest, past 24 hours, past week, past month, past year, or by a custom range. This isn’t just about real-time search, it’s about having regularly updated content, and staying fresh (though real-time search has its place within that).

Brian Klais, General Manager and VP of Product Mangagement at Covario, has a really good post over at Search Engine Land, talking about the time dimension in Google and its effect on sites’ rank – in other words, how content appears when a user adjusts the time filter in the left-panel.

"Here’s the bottom line: By institutionalizing a search time dimension with their UI, Google has introduced a new opportunity for all brands to steal (or have stolen) search marketshare from (or by) the competition," says Klais. "Brands that focus on dynamic site content with fresh social media output stand to gain searchers, at the expense of those brands who stay stagnant, one query at a time. The speed at which the gains and losses occur will be magnified by the availability (or lack) of content within each time filter. Now the ‘recency’ of social media will begin to matter in search."

To illustrate what he’s talking about, he points to a query for "men’s jeans" and looks at the results (which are quite different) for each time constraint. Based on this example, the smaller brand sites have a better shot at showing up the more frequently they are updated. The bigger brands tend to rank higher, the wider the range of time selected.

"The issue is a classic chicken or egg problem: unless you are present in the ‘fresh’ results now (aka ‘recency’), you cannot accurately predict what percentage of searchers are shifting to time-filtered results in order to make the business case for action," Klais says.  "Most analytic systems will not yet parse out this traffic either; it is just lumped in with all Google organic results."

"Ask yourself this question," he adds. "Is there a way to estimate whether any of your current keyword markets are time-sensitive and if you are currently getting organic traffic from time-filtered results?"

Of course, you don’t want to obsess over the time filter either. It’s just one of many options to consider, but to me, a blog could be a good way to keep offering fresh and relevant content around the keywords you are targeting. Plus, it can help you in the blog search option, not to mention provide useful content and engage an audience.

Note: Interestingly enough, not long after I wrote this article, Google announced that Caffeine is now complete. This is the new version of Google’s indexing system. It does not affect how Google ranks content whatsoever. What it does is speed up how fast Google indexes content. You can learn more about it here, and in this other interview with Cutts from SMX this past week. Essentially, it’s all about providing users with the freshest content possible, which is why it is somewhat related to the topic discussed above.

Do you you have a strategy to provide fresh content? Tell us about it.

For example, TechCrunch has launched a technology-flavored search engine as Yahoo cites as its first example. This search engine allows TechCrunch users to search for technology-focused articles and company info across TechCrunch’s network as well as the web, a Yahoo representative tells WebProNews.

BOSS vertical lens technology provides a handful of features that were implemented on the TechCrunch search engine:

- Real-time indexing of proprietary content – Once TechCrunch content is added or a user comment is submitted, the search index almost immediately reflects the changes.

- Customized ranking – The BOSS and TechCrunch teams worked closely to fine-tune the ranking algorithm to fit the TechCrunch audience and user experience.

- Structured search – BOSS supports faceted refinement around TechCrunch’s structured content.  This offers powerful tools for people who want to fine tune their searches or browse TechCrunch content – e.g. narrowing in on articles on Twitter written only by Michael Arrington, or only the most popular articles (popularity is determined by number of comments), or locating all companies that are founded in 2008. 

- Blending Web with proprietary content in a single search display – After querying both the TechCrunch and the Web indices, BOSS blends the results to produce one result set that is both relevant and comprehensive.

Speaking of BOSS, there’s a new post up on the Yahoo Developer Network blog talking a new tool that lets you match search terms with relevant keywords to increase search engine visibility. This is a new feature of BOSS and the tool, called Keywordfinder, does this as well.

The post also has an explanation of how to do the same thing using only javascript. The author says it’s not quite as simple but its not really magic either.