I know I said the next couple of posts would be about advertising networks; however much has happened in the world of online marketing over the past coupla weeks to sufficiently distract me. I’ll get back on target next week.

Anyways…

Google is constantly innovating new ways to improve the relevance of their search results. The newest kid on the block is real time results in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Real time results are comprised of “the latest thing” out there – be it a tweet, news report, or blog post. I am still not one hundred percent certain as to how it works, but as far as I can tell any search query that suddenly increases in volume will produce real time results.

As excited as Google is about this shift, as an SEO, I am honestly not sure how I feel about this move. It will certainly affect short-term SEO by moving certain results down on the page, so fewer long-term results will be above the fold, which is problematic, because that is prime real estate.

And here’s a question, Google: after having worked for weeks – nay, months! – on a website ensuring that it is relevant for specific keywords, and knowing that it offers valuable information to Google users who are entering search queries for said specific keywords, how is it that some random jerk on Twitter is ranking higher than me? For two to three seconds, maybe, but nevertheless. So much for an honest day’s work.

Anyway, having finished that rant, back to SEO…So clearly, these real time results will have some repercussions on SEO. The short term consequences are obvious – relevant search results will be pushed down temporarily, and perhaps there will be a slight dip in search engine traffic. A very slight dip. We are not all that interested in short term, however; we are interested in what ultimately will affect the bottom line – namely, revenue. The long term affects of real time results are a concern.

However, having said that, I do not believe that the SEO of a quality website will be affected negatively by real time search results in the long term. Maybe I’m just being optimistic, but an increase in the number of searches for a keyword means that the percentage of the increase will be clicking on the real time results, because clearly buzz was created around that keyword. The remaining searches – the “normal” percentage of daily searches – will still be searching for steadier, less viral results.

So at the end of the day, not only will real time search not negatively affect the SEO of the more static search results, it may even have a (very minor and short term) positive effect.

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