SEO Samba official SEO blog

Reading Google’s Mind Thanks to an Online Medium

That’s a pretty mysterious subtitle right? Imagine your ver own medium reading Google’s mind and telling you how the giant search engine is mapping your Web site to concepts in its mind.

Well, that’s my understanding of Google Wheel, the option released by Google last May. From what I read around the blogosphere, most think it’s a useless graphical representation of search results that looks into one’s Web site-related searches. However, when I dug into it, I realized that it wasn’t so much related searches that were used to reach your Web site and mapped in there, as much as a map of what Google thought of in terms of inter-related concepts surrounding your Web site. In a nutshell, “silos.”

I typed in our company brand into Google on May 26 and clicked the “Show Options” link. Here, I realized that somehow SEO Samba had been linked to the concept of “online mediums!!!” Funny, but not quite useful from our standpoint, since we provide a unique SEO software as a service that automates the execution of SEO best practices across vast numbers of Web sites.

On the next screenshot, I clicked on Google’s cache from my toolbar. Remember that, coincidentally, we’ve changed our homepage headers just a few days ago from “Predictable Search Engine Optimization Results” to “Maximize Organic Search Ranking Performance.” Obviously, Google has not updated their cache yet.

The updated homepage looks now like this;

However, it appears that using the word “predictable” in the H1 tag of our page has linked us to the concept of “online mediums.” Now that we’ve corrected what seems be the only reason why we would be linked to the “mediums” concept, I’ve decided to monitor Google Wheel and find out how it reacts.

On July 15 we see some changes with the wonder wheel’s related concepts for the query “SEO Samba.” The “online medium” concept, or silo, has disappeared, and Google Wheel related a more focused personae for our website.

Concurrently, we saw that our rankings have improved for SEO related queries on Google. However, the Google wheel then reverted to its former state, and as Google added back the same flawed related concepts to the Google Wheel, we saw our rankings slide for our seo focus queries.

On July 23, we see a new development with a brand new Google wheel a lot more conform to our market.

The conclusion, you ask? Well, we know for sure that:

• It took our site six weeks to temporarily get out of these unrelated concepts, or silos, and seven to see Google Wheel map some brand new concepts to our site.

Silos are probably built on a number of factors, but page content and wording does matter quite a bit. A simple word such as “predictable,” for example, can be misinterpreted by Google. Check out the Google Wheel to find out where your site fits into Google’s mind.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 1:48 am and is filed under Google, Search Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.