I have been making some changes to my feeds, which I clearly should leave alone as now Feedburner is openly mocking my lack of feed skills and questioning my decision to be involved in technology or the web at all. In any case, I’m trying some new things and am thinking I need a new post to restart the whole feed process.
So, here’s something different. Has anyone else noticed changes in the Google SERPs? Particularly, I’m wondering if they’re now bringing in Blogsearch as either an addition to universal search or as a new signal in the web results. As you might recall universal search launched with five verticals: news, local, video, images, and books. Adding blogsearch would make sense, as it’s fresh, relevant content.
When you do a blogsearch, related blogs sometimes appear at the top of the results. For me, you’ll notice that the Google Webmaster Central blog appears. Blogsearch still associates it with me, even though I haven’t posted there since June.
I noticed an interesting thing yesterday when I searched for name using web search (er, yes I’m very vain). The Google Webmaster Central blog shows up as the second result, even though my name doesn’t appear anywhere on the page. Now, if I click the cached link, I’m told that my name appears only in links to the page, so possibly it’s solely the anchor text that’s propelling the result to #2. I don’t remember seeing it there before though, which is what got me wondering about it.
More likely is that I didn’t notice it was there before, or other random changes have reordered my results. But it’s fun to wonder.
Tags: universal search
October 15th, 2007 at 9:48 am
I find it just as interesting when doing a [vanessa fox] vanity search that you and the webmaster central blog outrank wiki. That is an accomplishment unto itself that should be heralded.