I am not sure exactly when it happened, but some time in the last few hours I’ve started seeing a completely new view on the screen when I search for anything on Google.
The obvious difference right now is that there are a whole lot of options on the left side of the screen. From what I’ve seen, there are too many differences in terms of who ranks where, but there are a lot more options for users to refine their results and this leads to some interesting new ways to optimize your website for traffic. Of course, whether or not that is a significant amount of visitors will depend on how users behave in response to the new interface and how often they click on the search refinement options.
As a searcher, this looks like it could potentially be a great thing. For one, it makes searching by content date a lot easier, and that really helps in narrowing things down when I’m trying to do research for any political, historical, or economic papers.
Again though, as I mentioned in my last post, there are a whole lot of other things I’m supposed to be doing right now so I’ll have to give this some more thorough testing some time in the near future.
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It is not clear if this was done in conjunction with an algo update. Has any one seen any significant changes in their ranking?
I haven’t seen any evidence of new ranking methods, just a little bit of the usual dance. I would still expect that people might see different levels of traffic, but mostly just because searches have more ways to organize the results based on their preferences.
Or then again, a lot of people have been criticizing the “clutter” and feel of the new UI, so Google might even lose a little bit of market share on this one…
The new user interface is something I do not like at all. However, for 2 or 3 of my websites I’ve seen some interesting fluctuations for some heavy keywords, some in a positive way others in a negative way. Just hope to settle this so-called “dance”, I do not like when keywords fluctuate heavily.
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