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.
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. 🙂