There’s been a lot focus recently on Bing and whether or not Microsoft has (finally) got a hit on its hands. Personally, I think that no-one outside the search industry really gives too much of a shit. “Search” is Google as far as the great unwashed are concerned and I don’t see how Microsoft are going to shift that perception any time soon – no matter how much advertising cash they have knocking around the place. In the meantime, Google roll out innovations that will actually have a much bigger impact than anything coming out of Redmond. Plus ça change…
The Sidebar thing, which I promised faithfully to cover in more depth a couple of weeks back, has some very interesting features which will certainly be food for thought for the search industry. Yesterday, for example, I published a scatological little rant about Java. This blog has no fucking search presence whatsoever because, frankly, I don’t have the time nor the inclination to engage with all the self-promotion that’s necessary. Despite that, I had a couple of visits from Google for the term “sun microsystems.” Clearly I don’t have any domain expertise or presence enough to rank for that term and yet here’s Google sending me traffic.
The reason is the Sidebar. One of the options is to show recent results (or even to specify results from within the last 24 hours, a week, a month etc). I suspect that I got spidered pretty quickly and a couple of poor schmos looking to check out Sun for Whatever Reason used the sidebar to look for recent results… which, of course, included your humble scribe.
There’s a big lesson there for future SEO. Just as Google product feeds can let you sail past the slog of traditional organic rankings, so a constant flow of new content can keep you in front of savvy users of the sidebar. I daresay that will always be a fairly small fraction of users, but in a big market even a small fraction can spell Revenue – or at least that nebulous thing we call ‘mindshare’.
Age has always been a big factor in ranking. If you’ve got some well-established content with nice, aged links then you’re going to outrank some young pup with a 2 page blog 9 times out of 10. But now he might still get a piece of your pie purely because he’s writing about the topic now, and not eight years ago. You don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to see how to take advantage of this feature (although a Vocoder voice box would be aces).