Like a thief in the night, Google snuck in and turned on it’s real-time search feature. To give it a whirl you can head over to Google and search for a hot or trending topic using their latest (rather than the normal anytime) setting under options. You’ll see tweets & I believe Facebook statuses begin to appear in your search results. As a test I fired up twitter and posted a tweet with the words “wedding photography” in it. I then searched for the same terms in Google. Shock then set in…
It only took me 54 seconds to land at the very top of page #1 for “Wedding Photography”.
Ok I thought, the DWF has a very well liked twitter feed and we might have some Google pull but still. This could change everything we know about SEO! I really have no idea how this is going to play out but across the internet people are reporting that their normal SERPS are jumping all over the place.
SERPS = Search Engine Results Pages
Now granted in my short ten minutes of putzing around, not every term I tried showed real-time results and they do not always appear at the top of the page. Sometimes, they are embedded in the results page halfway down or even at the bottom. My concern is how will Google prevent this system from being gamed? I set up an auto tweeting program to flood an account with random phrases that make sense boosting me to the top of Google? Certainly not, that would turn SEO into something akin the anarchy of the wild wild west.
What does this mean to us and our SEO as wedding photographers trying to reach clients? For now it means I can do this in 44 seconds… SCARY!
Read more on Google Real Time Search. This is something I’ll be watching very closely over the coming days. What do you guys think?
4 Comments at "44 Seconds to First Place in Google"
It is an intersting change but it’s effect is currently only seen if the user chooses to modify the search results in the left hand column (like selecting “latest” as you have). I don’t think most searchers looking for small businesses like wedding photographers will modify the search like this. I think it will prove useful for searches regarding breaking news or current events though.
Until they integrate it 100% into regular search. BTW this is a great article which highlights the dangers.
http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-real-time-spam/
Very clearly though they are watching social media very closely. Under a minute until their servers downloaded it and processed it and decided it was relevant to my search.
At what point do they decide that it’s relevant beyond the latest news as well?
Does it influence the anytime SERPS?
All unanswered questions as best I can tell.
Clearly this is a bit of a mess. If it took you 54 seconds to #1 for wedding photography, then with near certainty someone else was #1 a few seconds later. For a more specialized search the result might stand a little longer, but I think a) people will recognize the difference between permanent websites and transient updates/tweets/etc and b) there’s no way anyone can stay on top of keeping themselves at #1 using social media without cheating/spamming which Google will no doubt block (they’re certainly smart enough to reduce the rank of the same tweet over and over). Spending the time to do so would mean no time spent on running a business, which would shortly fail. Without other major changes to searching this isn’t going to upset the apple cart.
Yeah, I agree with you Craig. It will soon be seen as a search result that applies to certain searches but largely ignored for other types of searches. I just checked a quick search for “Miley Cyrus” and the “latest results” scroller is actually coming up below the first few organic site results, not at the top. Still, very interesting and I am looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
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