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Cosmetic Changes at Google Precede Larger Overhaul
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor,
StepForth Placement Inc. (c) 2005

Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its
short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have
finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever
as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update
(http://www.webpronews.com/insidesearch/insidesearch/
wpn-56-20050607LastRoundOfTheGoogleBourbonUpdateFinishingUp.html)
were installed last Monday. This update has been staggered into
three and a half sections in order to avoid a massive amount of
dislocation in established rankings as was seen in previous
major updates. While changes stemming from the Bourbon Update
have not actually manifested into a full reordering of Google's
search engine results pages (SERPs), many individual webmasters
have reported fairly significant losses or gains in ranking over
the past few days.

There are dozens of factors behind changes at Google but the
greatest is the enormous valuation of the company itself. With
share prices nearing the $300 mark and current market
capitalization topping $80 billion, Google is considered the most
valuable media company in the world, surpassing the $78 billion
value of Time-Warner and rising far above Yahoo's estimated
value of $56 billion. Most of Google's riches are newly found,
having been generated after their August 2004 IPO. In their race
to outlast, outperform and outsmart their competitors, Google
has changed its PR strategy and its appearance to suit the
legions of suits swirling in and out of their Mountain View
offices.

While money may move mountains, it takes a community to change
an institution. The search environment has changed substantially
over the past three years and in that time, every major player
in the search sector has changed as well. Today, Google has
become a lot more complicated, so much so that it has stopped
trying to look simple. This change in corporate attitude is best
reflected in two places, the homepage and the About Google
section.

Google's homepage used to be quite simple. Recently, Google
created a personalized portal interface google.com/ig
(http://www.google.com/ig) offering users instant access to
several of these new features. For folks with Google accounts
such as Gmail users, subscribers to Google Groups, Google
desktop users and other account holders, personalized versions
of the once sparse homepage now presents instant entry points
to the various applications the individual uses. Many industry
observers have suggested Google's adoption of so many new
features and an all-in-one interface show they are moving
towards presenting themselves as more of a portal like Yahoo
or MSN. Google has always been a bit different than its
competition. Even when borrowing and innovating on competitors'
ideas, Google has, until now at least, managed to keep itself
at an arm's length from the mainstream in appearance and
operation. The maintenance of that image gave Internet users an
alternative view of Google, one that propelled Google to a
position of almost total dominance of the search engine sector.
While that dominance might have slipped over the past year,
Google is still the most popular search appliance in the world.

One of the ways Google has acted differently than others is in
the appearance of not taking itself too seriously. Its corporate
ethics policy was limited to the three word phrase, "Don't be
evil". Its front page interface retains the double-entendre
induced "I feel lucky" button, even though the button is rarely
used. The prospectus issued during their August 2004 IPO was
specifically written to appear idealistically anti-corporate.
Since its introduction, Google has practiced projecting a
simple, youthful image that required very little in the way of
explanation, so long as their search engine lived up to users'
expectations.

Google strives to live up to user expectations and, for the most
part, has met and exceeded them time and time again. There is
one long-held expectation that Google may not be able to live up
to any longer though. Many of us assume Google's relatively
informal public attitude will continue to carry over into the
later part of the decade. It won't. By comparison, Google will
almost certainly continue to be perceived as the search engine
driven by youthful energy. Whenever competitors such as MSN or
Yahoo try to appear as down-to-Earth as Google does, their
efforts seem obvious and forced. Does anyone remember that
poor-fellow in the butterfly suit wandering aimlessly around New
York last year? Google's communication style is maturing and the
best place to view these changes is on the About Google section
of their site.

Google has published information about itself on pages found
behind the "About Google" (http://www.google.com/about.html)
link for several years. While documents found in the About
section have never been totally static, a facelift over the past
few weeks has radically altered the look and feel of the section.
Along with the traditional organic search engine results and
highly targeted paid-ads, Google is actually a series of
30-someodd search-based applications ranging from alerts and
answers to wireless search and weather information. Driven in
part by an inventive entrepreneurial spirit and in part by a
desire to keep up with products offered by competitors, Google
has been rapidly adding new features and tools to their core
search service for the past three years.

Google's About Google page was once much smaller than it is
today. It has grown slightly larger every time Google adds
another offering to it. The biggest changes are found behind the
increasing number of links on the About page. Today's version of
the About page has five boxes added to the left hand side of the
page advertising Google Desktop
(http://desktop.google.com/enterprise/?promo=app-gdsfe-us-v1-1),
Blogger (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/), Google Code
(http://code.google.com/), Google Mobile (http://mobile.google.com/),
and My Search History (https://www.google.com/searchhistory/login).
In the center column, Google continues to show four main site
sections labeled, Our Search, For Site Owners, Our Company, and
More Google. Collectively, those sections contain a larger
number of links than they did previously and the number of
documents found behind those links has grown as well. Serious
Google users should take an hour or two to tour these changes
and learn more about the staggering range of features, services
and search-enhancements Google now offers.

For webmasters and SEOs, an examination of the new Google
Webmaster Guidelines is a definite must. Google has recently
changed its webmaster guidelines which are also considered to be
a primer on "ethical SEO" practices in relation to Google
placements. Google has recently updated its webmaster guidelines
to include information on "supplemental listings", crawling
frequencies and prefetching. Google has also posted information
on its new Google Sitemaps
(https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html)
experiment.

Google Sitemaps is perhaps the most important new feature for
SEOs offered by Google in a long time. Said to be an experiment
in spidering, Google Sitemaps invites webmasters to feed site
data directly to Google through an XML sitemap page. Webmasters
and SEOs can now tell Google exactly which sections of their
sites to crawl, and providing they are keeping their XML sitemap
current, when and where to look for changes to their sites. This
experimental initiative will especially help webmasters working
with database driven sites or large Ecommerce sites where
documents are subject to frequent change and are often found
behind long-string URLs. Google has been kind enough to provide
detailed information on establishing an XML feed and setting
priorities for Googlebot.

As it grows, Google appears to be running into the same problem
other webmasters with numerous sites or services encounter, the
rapid dilution of a domain's unique topic focus. In order to
keep themselves accessible, understandable and relevant,
Google's teams of engineers, programmers and public relations
specialists are involved in what appears to be a massive
overhaul of the interface, public documents and the basic
sorting algorithm that produces organic results. As in previous
years, how this all plays out in the end is entirely up to the
searching public. From the SEO/SEM perspective, it is a good
thing Google is in the midst of this update. Web workers have
been demanding a greater degree of transparency from Google for
some time now and perhaps these updates are the beginning of a
new commitment to communication from the Googleplex.

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Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing
expert based in Victoria BC.  Jim writes and edits full-time for
StepForth. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes
the opportunity to share his experience through interviews,
articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at:
jimhedger@stepforth.com
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