Google Vertical Search Canibalizing Google's Organic SERPs
I searched to see if the movie An Inconvenient Truth was playing in a local theater. Google not only showed the Movie OneBox result, and offer a movie search feature, but they also rank the Google Video trailer in their search results and are caching the movies result page. Loren recently posted an in depth article showing how much Google is doing to add interactivity to and exposure for Google Video.
As Google adds features and consumer generated media to Google hosted vertical content pages many review sites and thin sites in high margin verticals will lose a good portion of their value, link equity, and traffic. A big thing that places Google ahead of most review sites is that they will not only collect and structure their own feedback, but their knowledge of language and the web graph makes it easy to access some of the best review information on other sites.
In a couple clicks I can go from reading feedback on Google to reading aggregated feedback snippets from other sites to reading some of the other best reviews on the web. For example, it takes little effort to see the official site, the contempt some sectors show the film, a more objective review, and a speech which inspired the creation of the film.
Comments
I think anytime a major player like Google is pushing a new product of theirs, it gives us an opportunity to capitalize. It just provides us with another easy outlet for exposure to whatever we offer. Especially in that product's early stages.
Which search query produced these results?
Ultimately we all have an interest in search engines working as well as they possibly can. That means the most valuable content gets the most exposure. Possibly social tagging sites do this better than the raw grind of web-spider algorithms... because everybody gets a vote.
Add new comment