As owner of 65% of the U.S. search market, Google has the ability to change the search engine marketing space with each update it makes; on average, the engine implements 500 potentially game-changing modifications to its search algorithm per year. However, the search giant’s tendency to not disclose the details of its updates and, thus, the potential for bias and violation of antitrust law, has resulted in an investigation into its search technology by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
In an effort to increase its transparency, Google published details of 10 of its most recent updates on its corporate blog. Still, Google Engineer Matt Cutts reminds readers that the brief snippets are merely a glimpse into the hundreds of updates that modify the Google search environment. The changes revealed in the post were specifically chosen because it is unlikely that marketers or website owners will use the details to “game” the system and use black hat techniques to gain higher search rankings.
Some of these most recent updates, however, deserve more attention than a brief snapshot behind the scenes of Google development processes. For example, Google’s October decision to encrypt all searches made by logged in Google users has been estimated to have an average impact on 10% of search traffic. This update comes on top of a recent addition to the 2010 Caffeine indexing system that is estimated to impact 35% of search by prioritizing more recent content. These two instances are a strong example of the power Google wields to create change in the organic search space. Take into consideration that Google will be placing increasing importance on the content of website and landing pages as opposed to the header or menu text, and search engine marketers could be looking at a future rife with significant strategy overhauls.
