Google's Cool New Traffic Tool
Posted On: 2006-10-25
Could I possibly find something nice to say about Google?
If you've read any of my ramblings in other places you will know that I am definitely not a major fan of Google. Quite frankly the big G scares me witless with the power and information that it holds. I can't remember who first said that knowledge is power but they were dead right and one day we are going to see the power that Google already has and it won't be a pretty sight.
However, sometimes Google does come out with something very useful and a few days ago they launched something that I see as being of incredible use to Webmasters. We are always hungry for traffic and we always need to make the traffic we can get work as hard as possible and this tool has the potential to do just that.
That cool new traffic tool is Google's customized search engine. You can sign up for it at google.com/coop and you should be right there right now signing up as fast as your little fingers can hit the keys because that tool has potential.
The customized search engine allows you to install a Google search box on your website and it allows you to list the sites that you want Google to search if someone enters a keyword or phrase into that search box. Not only does it do all that but you get the option to allow the resulting search engine results pages to show all relevant sites for the keyword or phrase or just your sites.
Now, you might think that there is a good case to be made to allow Google to show all relevant sites for a search term and Google does say that it will make your sites stand out in that listing but just be a little cautious. Steve set one up yesterday for our mainstream sites and chose the option to allow Google to list all relevant sites.
When he typed in a term that usually shows one of our sites on page seven of the search engine results pages Google's idea of making our sites stand out was to list that site at number three on page one. Now that's obviously a great boost from page seven but there were still two competing sites listed above our site and those two sites would get most of the clicks.
So he went back and chose the alternative option that instructs Google to only list the sites that you want listed. Using the same search term then only listed the sites that we had included when setting up the search engine.
So if you want to keep your traffic and make it work harder then choose the option that only allows Google to search and return your sites.
As I mentioned a moment ago, the sites that Google will search are the ones that you include at the time you're setting up the customized search engine - or that you add later. To include those sites all you have to do is enter the URLs and Google does the rest.
And that has to open up a huge range of possibilities. Can you include sponsor code in those URLs? I'm not sure because we haven't had time to test that yet but if you could think of the possibilities. Even if you couldn't what would there be to stop you using sub-domains to set up landing pages that Google would then list if you included those URLs?
It's interesting that, in the examples Google supplies to help you set up your search engine, it includes some sub-domains.
Now what if you wanted to trade traffic with someone? What is to stop you from trading URLs in your customized search engines? Instead of swapping hard links that may actually have a detrimental effect on your search engine listings now you can swap URLs in your customized search engines and not run the risk of a negative mark against your site.
Of course getting people to actually use that customized search engine is going to be a challenge but it's not something that a little creative copy won't overcome. You can encourage surfers to use the search engine by directing them to it with some encouraging text. If they don't find what they're looking for on the page they are currently on you can hold on to them and offer them something more in your other sites.
In all this goodness there is one minor downside. In past ramblings I've talked about the importance of meta description and the need to really make them attractive to attract people who are using the search engines to find what they want. Now, for some reason that I haven't quite figured out those meta descriptions stand out even more.
Steve took one look at the sites our test returned for one of our favorite mainstream terms and shuddered. They looked terrible and re-writing them is going to be high on our agenda.
However, all things considered, we're both excited about this new tool and can't wait to implement it on a few of our sites. Of course finding the time to do that is going to be the real challenge.