Listen Carefully
Posted On: 2008-07-03
You know, there are some people out there who are great listeners but somehow I don't think I'm one of them. All too often instead of listening to what people are actually saying I'm busy filtering their message through my experiences and sometimes through what other people might have already told me.
I guess that I'm not alone in doing that and that must mean that a lot of us don't really listen very carefully when people are talking to us. And if we're not listening carefully then we really could be missing an important message.
That almost happened to me today when I was watching a short video of an interview with Google's Marissa Mayer. She was being interviewed about the amount of data that Google retains about an individual's search patterns and whether or not there were privacy concerns about that information.
For anyone who is aware of just how much information Google knows about individuals there was nothing really new in that interview. The fact is that Google does retain a heck of a lot of personal information about individuals and it can use that information clearly identify individuals by name.
Despite all the obvious pointers to the contrary all Marissa Mayers could do when asked if Google was a threat to an individual's privacy and be the epitome of Big Brother was to smile sweetly and suggest that Google would never do anything like that. And so the obvious answer is that Google knows and retains more information about us than it should.
However that's just old news for those of us who know the obvious; the real meat for Webmasters was something else that Mayer's touched on. At one point in the interview she was explaining why it might be beneficial for individuals if Google did have access to their personal search patterns and one of the reasons she gave was because Google might re-arrange its search engine results page for an individual if it knew that person's search patterns.
For example on a strictly algorithmic basis a certain website might be listed at the top of the search engine results page for a certain term. However people who searched for that term might not be inclined to click on the first link because it just didn't attract them.
Instead they might make their first click on the site that was listed in third place. So to improve the search experience for people using Google to look for that term Google would rearrange the search engine results page so that the post popular site was listed first.
Now that Google could do something like that should come as no surprise to us. After all that's exactly what they've been doing with their Adwords advertising for some years now. In Adwords a business can make the top bid to get their Adwords ad displayed at the top of the listing but Google is under no obligation to place it there. Instead if another business' ad is somewhere further down the list but attracts most clicks then Google is going to move it to the top of the list.
So I guess it was only a relatively minor step to apply the same ranking structure to search engine results pages once Google knew what was most popular with most people. However that minor step then means that we've got an extra challenge when it comes to getting good rankings in the search engine results pages.
Now we have to make our sites the most attractive for searchers and so increase the popularity of our sites but how do we do that?
To find the answer to that question you need to think about your own search habits. Do you always click on the top listing or do you scan some of the other listings before you decide what to click on? If you do scan those other listings before choosing a site to visit what makes you choose that particular site over any of the others on the first page of the search results?
I'm not going to give you the easy answer for this ... at least not in this column because I've talked about it here before. Instead, go and look for yourself and discover the answer for yourself. Trust me, it's not hard to find ... in fact it's glaringly obvious ... but if you haven't been listening carefully to what I've said in the past ... if you've filtered my message to you through your own views and the opinions of others ... then you've probably missed it.