As most of us (hopefully) know, one of the greatest problems facing our planet today is pollution. Tons of carbon emissions and immense trash heaps drown the environment, and this problem only increases with the population. We continue to create more and more waste, and fail to find an effective way to manage it.
But what does this have to do with Google search results?
Well, there is another kind of waste hiding beneath the headlines, impacting our daily lives: digital waste. This “digital waste” clouds up our search results, inhibiting us from finding the answers we need.
Google uses a variety of highly complex algorithms, with simple and often adorable code names (like Panda or Pigeon) to bring us results for each query we make. Googlebot constantly crawl public websites and add them to the system index. These sites are ranked on many factors to determine where they appear in the results page. The most important factors include technical aspects, popularity of the site, quality of the content, and age of the site. Google’s algorithms mostly produce accurate, relevant results from authoritative and trusted websites, and everyone’s happy. However, in specific types of searches this system fails, leaving us with stale results, feeling frustrated.
Stale results pop up when the older, authoritative sites are shown by Google, even when they are offering outdated, maybe even inaccurate information.
Let’s look at some examples.
Here you would like to know the shortcut for taking a screenshot on your mac computer, so you search “how to screenshot on mac.”
Interesting discovery today, a search on www.google.com.au showed some different looking serps. I noticed Google has moved the location of the URL to the upper left hand side just below the title tag of the website before the description tag.
It used to be below the description tag on the lower left hand side.
It is quite interesting how different the SERP look by simply moving the placement of the URL. Not exactly sure why they would be making this move, but it is clear that having sitelinks, becomes more important that ever.
It appears about a year ago people at Webmasterworld had seen this within adwords. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4142468.htm
