Let’s play a game!

Think about the engineers behind a search engine for a second.

What are you picturing?

Was this it?

MC Hammer with parachute pants in his full 1990’s glory? No really!

His-his-his-his new search engine hits me so hard makes me say, uh oh Bing
Thank you for giving me an engine to search beyond just things
It feels good when what you want is heard
A deeper search, beyond just one word
WireDoo, and it’s known as such
And this is an engine, uh, u can’t touch

Well, you can touch it if you sign up for the pre-beta test. And if they email you back telling you that they’re ready.

Announced by none other than MC Hammer (Stanley Kirk Burrell) at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, WireDoo is described as a search engine that lets you get beyond one keyword and search on themes and related topics in what Hammer calls “deep search”, something that the big engines don’t let you do today. It searches the way it thinks you would think. So, if you’re looking for “Bali holiday”, you’ll get information on flights, hotels, tours, activities, travel insurance, maps, rental cars, exchange rates, pictures, reviews, etc.

You can read more about WireDoo from the LA Times.

What will this mean for the search industry?

Only time will tell.

We know that converting people from an engine they’re comfortable with is no small task, so it won’t be the easiest road ahead. But as a good capitalist, I say that more competition and new ideas can only be a good thing.

And more parachute pants. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.

Google advisor (only available in the US currently) is another Google tool that helps the user make financial decisions easier and faster, such as comparing a mortgage or credit card.

So how does it work?

Simply go to Google advisor and type in information that you may be looking for relating to a financial product – be it a credit card, mortgage, different CDs (Certificate of Deposit or known to us Aussies as high interest savings accounts), or other bank accounts e.g. savings or checking.

Google advisor then displays information, rates, contact details and offer options that is related to your criteria. The information is displayed side by side for easy comparison, which is a nice touch. If you need to make a slight adjustment to your criteria, the data instantly update the results. All in all this allows the searcher to compare and view their options as well as the offers out there without even having to speak to a provider.

Another nice touch is that the searcher has total control of how much or how little information they want to share, which providers they want to talk to and which ones they don’t! No personal information needs to be shared either unless they want to pursue with the offer option.

What does this mean for the consumer? Ultimately this new tool can save them a fair bit of time and effort – no more paperwork or filling out forms for forms sake and it also limits the need to give personal details up front.

Here is a little demonstration given by Google:

Google Advisor’s Future

So, where do Google take it from here?

There are actually quite a few options on the table for them.

• New Products – add additional financial products such as loans, insurance, or there is even possibility to venture into the realms of utilities including Gas, Electricity, phone and internet providers
• “Featured Offers” – these are highlighted on the site currently, it would be interesting to see if in the long run financial institutions begin to pay for this privilege
• Lead Generation – Google is not being paid for credit cards, CDs, and personal banking listings currently but is already being paid for mortgage lender leads. (Almost like an affiliate network). This is a definite possibility for Google if they choose to monetise this offering
• Ad Integration – be it comparison ads or Google’s own ad extensions of some sort
• Demographic Targeting – similar to other comparison website, Google Advisor provides financial institutions with a very targeted audience. Google could take it to the next level and provide even further demographic targeting to advertisers by harnessing the power of a searchers Google profile

How will this affect companies?

If Google do expand this to include other products and roll it out to other countries they need to be careful that they don’t tread on the feet of other financial comparison companies. Plenty of these guys invest a lot of money on PPC campaigns (we’re talking millions of dollars a year investment here) and Advisor could hurt either their relationships with Google and ultimately cause these companies to invest less money on PPC.

In summary, Google Advisor is something to look out as there will certainly be some form of impact on the comparison industry when it rolls out locally, which will be interesting to watch unfold.

Yesterday, after a long wait for many retailers (see my Product Search for Mobile post from ‘09 ), Google Shopping was officially launched in Australia. Interchangeably known as Google Product Search, it allows searchers to easily discover product information online, compare prices across retailers, read reviews and ultimately find the best place to make a purchase. In essence, it helps inform the research phase of the buying cycle.

Google Shopping is styled as an extension to Google’s usual search offering rather than a competitor and offers a service similar to those offered by the likes of GetPrice and Shopping.com. A key point for retailers to note is that when a product listing is clicked on within Google Shopping, it takes the user to the specific product page on that retailer’s site, by which time they should be well informed and ready to purchase.

(more below)

E-commerce retailers can submit their product catalogues for free via Google Merchant Center which then makes them eligible to appear in Shopping results (submission is via a data feed or an API for advanced users). As with regular Google search, an algorithm determines what product listings hold most relevance to search queries users make, and other factors such as frequency of inventory(catalogue) updates, photo clarity, title used etc will affect your chances of ranking strongly. Shopping results can appear directly within the regular Google search results where relevant, as part of Universal Search. For this reason, SEO results could be be impacted as top 10 rankings may be pushed further down the page to allow for integration of blended Shopping results.

Google has specified that products must have a set price to appear in Shopping results, hence auction listings are not eligible to appear. Filters can be set on the left hand side to narrow results to a specific price range. In the above example, eBay listings appear since they offer a ‘Buy Now’ price.

For more information on the opportunity this presents to paid search advertisers, please take a minute to read my colleague Marion’s post on Google Product Extensions.

Word emanating from the US over the past few days is that Google have made a change to their organic ranking algorithm, which they claim will positively affect 12% of all searches (don’t they always?!). The official Google blog announcement states the change is designed to improve relevancy in their results and “reduce rankings for low-quality sites”. While the general online population should (and do) welcome this change, as always when Google makes major algorithmic tweaks, several sites/webmasters are claiming unjust punishments.

Informed commentary believes that the change is aimed at what we know as scraper sites and content farms (despite no official confirmation from Google). “Sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful” will likely see previously strong rankings drop significantly. Many of these sites hold what some see as artificially inflated rankings attributable to things like link schemes (JCPenney, anyone?), and usually don’t offer much of substance to a web surfer. Google’s ongoing mission is to provide people with useful information relevant to their query and eliminate spam from their results.

In one of the first blog posts on the topic from SearchEngineLand, the ever nimble Danny Sullivan coined the term ‘farmer update’. Some of the more interesting comments over there include:

TeacherPaul: “Many high quality sites got hurt deeply by this change. We’re not talking about content farmers or even extremely small gardens. Good people, great content, using honest methods…. a 40% drop in Google referrals on average”

Feedthehabit: “My original content at FeedTheHabit.com gets copied, re-copied and posted all over the Web the second I click publish. I saw a 25% drop in traffic from Wed to Thurs…”

Miker d: “After 10 years of creating content to help others, it looks like our traffic took a 30-40% dip from Google starting Feb 24th”

TheTopTens: “Despite the fact that the site provides a genuinely positive user experience based on user behavior and conversion rates, US traffic after the update is down approximately 50% with high traffic keywords being the hardest hit.”

Dan Coxon: “All of my articles are original, in-depth, and written by myself. But the traffic seems to have dropped dramatically overnight, sometimes by as much as 60%”

(The above comments need to be taken with a pinch of salt – despite the consistency with traffic dips, the bigger picture needs to be examined here such as the link profile etc. of the sites in question)

We move into a slightly grey area when we try to define a content farm. Is it fair to say that article sites could be considered content farms? While not all content these sites publish is necessarily high-quality, some of it can be very useful and topically relevant for searchers – how would distinction be drawn between high-quality original and low-quality republished content on the same site?  Can an algorithm categorically grade content high/low quality?

Going back to scraping & copying content, Google could look at the original date each webpage was found & indexed, but what happens if your content is scraped, published and indexed before the bots revisit or visit your site? Also, the ‘last modified’ header in itself cannot be used as the sole determinant, since the original page may just have been slightly updated, moving it’s ‘last modified’ date further in time than the scraped content. The official line from Matt Cutts is that “we look at various signals to determine which page is the original one, which usually works very well”, but in reality they cannot always get it right. One would imagine that identifying and flagging these issues becomes somewhat of a manual process in cases where it’s not clear cut. I would also suspect other factors like domain authority/link reputation/topic clustering come into play.

For now it looks as if we’ll have to sit tight and keep an eye on how this one plays out – just like every update. Fortunately for those of us in Australia, it has been mentioned the change currently only affects US traffic, so we’ll have a bit more time to absorb the effects stateside leaving us in a better position when the tweak goes global.

As always, more than keen to hear others thoughts/experiences!

Google seems to have taken a positive step in creating more choice and transparency when it comes to music-related video searches.

Within the Google blended results Google have begun displaying other video sites than YouTube to offer search engine users more choice.

However one has to ask if this a reactive response to criticism about Google’s bias to YouTube given their affiliation with them or a proactive strategy in an attempt to offer the better search results?

Despite this it appears the YouTube listings are still dominating the top 3 results on the blended results pages but the sub links are offered as alternatives to other sites such as MTV and MySpace.

Google have come under attack from various authorities regarding Anti-Trust and accusations that they have a visible bias to their own sites within SERPS. In response to the European Commission’s review Google has published on Google’s Publicity Blog that they state that Google was created for users not websites and that they aim to be as transparent as possible.

Anything that offers more relevant search results can only be a good thing but the Anti-Trust Investigation against Google has surely played a part in authoring this change.

At present this new algorithm only seems to be applicable for music related searches so is this a sign of things to come with plans to roll out across all searches or just something designed to pacify the powers that be? Watch this space.

2010 has been a busy year for search engines, and it is becoming more and more important for them to provide the most relevant results, as the search volumes has been regularly increasing year on year.

Each year, there have been an increasing number of searches, more searchers, and those searchers do more searches themselves, so one thing is for sure: ranking well for key search terms is more important than ever.

Let’s have a look at the top changes search engines brought in 2010, in order for them to provide more relevant results and drive searchers to their site:

#1 Google drinks too much coffee and brings out the “caffeine” update

What does that mean for results? Where Google used to index pages and sites in regular waves, this update allowed them to update their results incrementally, meaning quicker indexing. If you are working to get your site optimised,

you will see changes quicker, whether they are positive or negative.

This caused quite a stir in the SEO business as rankings changed, pages disappeared and came back, but it quickly stabilised. People following the big Google algorithm updates will know it usually does impact the results quite a bit but it is always an intense moment!

#2 What you say online becomes a ranking factor

Social media is growing at a fast pace, Twitter is going to hit the 200 million user mark early this year, Facebook has already over 500 million users and its founder already has a biography movie after only 20 years of his life. Impossible for search engines to miss out on the opportunity to surf the social media wave and use the huge amount of content being shared to display more accurate results, so they started in 2010!

Google started by crawling Twitter feeds and links, and provided a “Real time” search option which enables us to search for tweets on specific keywords. There was also a debate trying to determine whether links from Twitter provide some benefits to the pages they link to, and some recent findings would lead to believe that engaging in the Tweetosphere has to be on the 2011 agenda. Google also detects when people share links with friends on Facebook.

Bing on the other hand created a partnership with Facebook, in order for them to be able to use “likes” from users to affect rankings for pages using the Facebook “Like” button.

But this is only the beginning, and 2011 will reveal many more social media related algorithm updates.

#3 Slow typers discover the joys of Google Instant

Late 2010, Google added the “Instant” feature, which provides results as you type, without having to hit “enter” for the results to display.

For many, it is more of a gadget than anything else, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one having noticed high search volumes for keywords that aren’t complete… For example, if you use the Google Keyword Tool, you’ll notice some keyword suggestions are keywords that aren’t complete such as “car ins” or “seo consu”.

Where this simplifies search for the user, this also impacts websites focusing on some longer tail keywords, so I would recommend keeping an eye open to how this can affect your traffic.

#4 Local results take over

Firstly, Google (again) have made 2010 a year to tackle the challenge of local results. Most queries including a location keyword (city, suburb, postcode, country) now display local results.

After launching Google Places, for every local query, they displayed a map with pins between the sponsored results and the organic results. This apparently was not good enough so they changed the display in order for the local results to look more like organic results, with a map on the top right hand side.

This means owning your business on Google places is very important, as this can provide a valuable spot on the first page of Google, if done and optimised well.

Evidence shows that Google is investing heavily in local search (Marissa Meyer, VP Search, moved to Local, trying to buy Yelp) and wants to use maps in a more efficient manner. 2011 will see some interesting evolutions on that side, that’s for sure.

Secondly, where mobile search tends to blend in with mainstream search, it is still a great platform to provide bespoke local results for mobile. Google Places has been implemented on Android and can be used as a standalone app. More generally, apps developed on mobile platforms are using GPS location to display local results for businesses such as bars, restaurants, banks and more. This is where local online presence becomes key.

#5 Love is in the air between Yahoo and Bing

2010 was the year where they decided to merge their organic results in an attempt to compete against Google in a more efficient way. Bing had been increasing its market share but was mainly taking them from Yahoo so, when the merger took place, Google remained the big winner.

In Australia, Google still has 95% market share while Bing/Yahoo have 4.5%. The remainder is shared among small search engines such as Altavista and Ask. (source: statcounter.com, as of Oct 2010)

As an onside, this merger has affected Yahoo’s Site Explorer quite a bit and as a result it seems like link popularity and saturation have been fairly inconsistent these past few months. So hopefully early 2011 will see this great toll get back on track!

#6 How quick does your website load?

If you feel like your website takes a while to load when on a broadband connection, then it probably is getting penalised in rankings, compared to other quicker to load competing websites.

Google decided 2010 was the year to start applying the rationale “I want my users to find relevant sites which don’t take too long to load too avoid user frustration”. Based on opinions from SEOs all around the world, this has quickly become a key factor to website optimisation.

Using Yslow for example, you will be able to assess your website and get to learn about “minifying”, “css sprites”, “gzipping”, “http requests” and other ways of reducing the page loading time and have a website Google will want to put on top.

I actually think this is positive from a user’s perspective, it makes web browsing so much more comfortable, and it pushes web developers to clean up their code; thus improving the standards of the web.

#7 New guys on the block

2010 has seen the appearance or the discovery of some interesting new competitors to the big G (Google). Instead of replicating, these new search engines are actually innovating how to search for websites.

The first and probably most interesting one for SEO is Blekko, launched in 2010 with an interesting concept using slashtags which Rich Skrenta explains here:

“Slashtags let all of the vertical engines that people define on Blekko live within the same search box. They also let you do a search and quickly pivot from one vertical to another.”

So if you want to shop for the item you are searching, you would type “red dress /shop”.

The most interesting one which relates to social media: the Likes slashtag. Do you want to display results that your Facebook friends liked? Simply type “kitten videos /likes” !

Other search engines generating interest are Yandex in English (biggest SE in Russia) and DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo has actually been around for a few years now, but it’s only recently that it has been getting a bit more attention.

#8 Other Google related updates worth reminding

Ever tried converting measures or currencies using Google? Or getting simple questions answered directly without having to click into a website? That’s one of the 2010 added features from Google.

Search for “20 Australian dollars in us dollars” and you’ll get the converted currency below the search box. Search for “how high is the Eiffel tower” and again, you’ll get the answer below the search box (1,063 feet for those who are curious).

Another interesting SEO related discovery is the increased likelihood of getting your website crawled thoroughly if your brand comes up in the online reputable press (such as “The Australian”). It has been discovered that the Google bot will read about the brand in an article and would then go to the brands website and crawl it extensively. So get your PR teams working and you could just see your brand gain reputation online.

#9 Youtube Videos

Youtube is the second most popular social site after Facebook in Australia, and sees 35 hours’ worth of video uploaded every minute. To put this in perspective, Hunter Walk, Youtube’s Director of product management, explains: “If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week.”

2010 is yet the biggest year for Youtube in terms of popularity, meaning having an online presence using video has never been as important.

With its improved video optimisation options such as video transcripts, 2011 will be the year to jump on the band wagon, if you haven’t already, and get some videos uploaded and fully optimised in order to make sure you are found.

The last two weeks have been very busy for Google and the online marketing community with the release of Place Search and trials commencing of Boost Ads via Google Places.

Google says “Our goal is to help you feel like a local everywhere you go!” With the launch of these new features focusing on local information in the organic search results, it can only be a win for local businesses or will it?

On the 27th October 2010 Google announced Place Search:

“Today we’re introducing Place Search, a new kind of local search result that organizes the world’s information around places. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go.” Below is an Australian example of the layout:

Place Search results will begin appearing automatically on Google when they predict you’re looking for local information. In addition, you’ll find a new link for “Places” in the left-hand panel of the search results page which you can switch to at any time.

For example, searching for “rugby” will not automatically trigger Place Search results:

However, clicking the “Places” link (highlighted in blue) will preview the new Place Search results:

Our testing has uncovered that the “places’ link on the left hand side does not display any listings if you are searching on a different Google domain from the one for your current country location. For example, if the user is located in Australia and searches the term “shoes” on google.com when you click “places” no results are displayed. However, the Place Search does work perfectly well, if you are in Australia and perform the same search on google.com.au. This is particularly interesting as Google usually attempts to show localised results on a standard search, irrespective of which Google country domain you are actually performing the search on.

The purpose of Place Search is to provide users with a comprehensive view of a place quickly and easily with a single results page now providing 30 to 40 relevant links. Google has done testing and Place Search saves people an average of two seconds on searches for local information (Source: Official Google Blog). Place Search has been rolling out globally in more than 40 languages since last week.

Google’s vice president of product management, John Hanke explained recently “more than four million businesses have a Place page and about 20% of Google search queries focus on local places and he expected the redesign to increase the number of local searches handled by Google”. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)

On Monday the 27th October Google announced Boost Ads. Boost ads will be a new online advertising solution to help local businesses connect with potential customers in their area. The ads can be created within Google Places and be eligible to appear in the “Sponsored Links” section of Google.com and Google Maps search result pages. This is currently only in beta version and is restricted to the areas of San Francisco, Houston and Chicago, so stay tuned, I’m sure it’ll get here eventually…

First reactions to Place Search and Boost Ads have been that Google is concerned competitors are gaining the upper hand with more focused localised advertising such as Facebook’s advertising platform and now Facebook Deals. Either way, it will be interesting to see the impact if any Google Place Search has on paid and organic search results and traffic volumes over the coming months.

The launch of Google Place Search has highlighted the importance of customer interaction, user generated content and addressing negative comments is paramount to installing trust in local businesses services to the online community. A social media strategy and brand reputation management is vital for online businesses today.

Focussing on a strong SEO strategy coupled with a well-executed Google Places strategy, such as a quality local linking, as well as monitoring external reviews and ratings will go a long way to ensuring presence and longevity in the ever-changing landscape of Google search results.

In previous posts I wrote about some potential changes for Google’s infrastructure which Matt Cutts called Caffeine. Now, Matt did say (I guess we are on a first name basis) that they were going to hold off on this update until after Christmas 2009. This was done because last time a big update occurred it was right before Christmas and it negatively affected online retail sales. So, a bit of love – just in case Caffeine would have a significant affect in the SERP’s.

Then there was a ranking change which introduced the idea of how web page speed is being factored into the ranking criteria. I will reiterate here – relevancy is still the key metric.

But, something significant happened in Q1-Q2 2010 and Webmasterworld, as has always been done in the past, called a new, noticed algorithm changed “Mayday”.

This appears to have affected a large number of webmasters with reported traffic drops ranging from a 10% to 90% loss with a very apparent change on how Google is handling long-tail phrases and how far more spammy sites seem to be appearing in some results. This thread on Webmasterworld is long with a lot of analysis and speculation resulting in 13 pages of posts, so I’d suggest going straight to page 13.

This has had a much more noticeable affect and is apparently not finished yet. As Google isn’t too forthcoming Mayday could be a part of Caffeine; however, this shouldn’t necessarily be so because Google stated that Caffeine would be purely an infrastructure change that most users would probably not notice.

One poster, dusky, summarises on May 12th:

“There are too many legitimate white hat sites being whacked to believe it’s a penalty. Many well established gov and edu sites, large commercial and corporate sites, well known news and media sites that seen a change for the worst so far for the last three months at least and starting MayDay in particular. G* sites themselves are affected as noted above and somewhere else, how many more days or weeks this is going to take is probably everyone’s question, at least the people who join my “total re-index” camp anyway, or shall I call it total-recall. We used to think they lost some or most of the data when this happened, and that’s why the crawl rate and the re-indexing, but it turned out it was due to infrastructure and algo updates, Florida and BigDaddy are best examples.”

We have a theory based on TF-IDF. Ian Lavelle, my colleague here at Outrider, took the time to show us how this algorithm change (and apparent surge in spam pages showing in search results) could affect the long-tail. You can read Ian’s post here.

UPDATE

I thought I’d update this post based on the fact that SearchEngineLand has posted a confirmation of the Mayday algorithm change on May 27, 2010 (see excerpt below):

“Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks……

……However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”. Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A,  ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.””

Closing the door behind me, I enter, exhausted from the day’s work. I take a breath, blindly gazing into the luminescent space that was once my TV and start my search. With raised hands and a smile I finally understand why the new search interface has had so much hype. With a flip of my hand I find last night’s movie, it knew I wanted to watch it, I straighten my finger, push effortlessly into nothingness and fall backwards oozing into the sofa. The movie starts; I laugh a little and wonder how magnificent the technology of 2110 is…

Imagine if that was your nightly routine, the ability to search for anything, anytime, at an unprecedented level of integration with day to day life without the aid of what we accept to be the ‘personal computer’. The future holds many promises and many concerns but ultimately technology is designed to make our life and needs easier.

Search engines are notoriously predictable, if something is hyped up on the TV or through a social site you can bet there is likely to be a presence on the front page of search engines pretty quickly. Google has attempted to provide a personalised search option but to much avail. According to www.readwriteweb.com 57% of respondents said there was very little difference or actually a noticeably worse set of results returned while personalised search was enabled.

Although personalised search is a burden on the SEO community, skewing the true results that we so dearly relay on being transparent and exact, the future is likely to force us in new directions.

Providing search engine optimisation services for personalised search would make the way we work very different. The need to provide inbound links, which many search engines value so highly, may take a backwards step for other factors push through the field and take front line. Social media buzz is likely to become a valuable asset in the SEO specialist’s arsenal to spread the word and create a buzz about a new product; the voice of many is a powerful asset.

True personalised search would require a new level of integration with technology and users alike, think Minority Report. Each and every person is an individual with likes and dislikes in style, culture and influence and aggregating the most visited sites into one set of top results wouldn’t be suitable, serving up the same web pages time and time again would likely allow the giants to dominate the market.

Providing results based on what a user talked about that day or which colour their eyes focussed on the most would allow new avenues or markets to emerge and flourish amongst the giants.

Technology such as Microsoft Surface could be a portal into a world where interacting with technology is treated as a user defined experience not a set game plan with varying results. Search engines may not change, they will always be here but they must adapt to the way users interact.

They better hurry though the future isn’t as far away as we think…

Many of you will have already noticed the latest enhancement to Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS) where a breadcrumb, or “clickable” hierarchy of the website, is displayed, replacing the traditional listing URL. Search listings will be replaced with the new Google breadcrumb trails when Google feels a website’s current URL structure lacks context.

Industry thinking is that not only will the Google breadcrumb trails enhance the user experience but they will provide an increase in click through rates for site owners, as users will be given more information about their search query which may in turn influence where they click.

For example, traditional URLs appear as “/selling-your-bike-on-ebay/” where keywords entered by the users search query are bolded (as shown below).

The new Google breadcrumb feature will replace traditional URLs with “> Buy > Cars, Bikes, Boats > Trailers >” providing direct links to parent pages or sections, further increasing the number of entry points to a website (as shown below).

Google announced the new “user enhanced” display on 18 November 2009 in a blog post, which outlines the objective in providing clearer navigational options for users arriving at a website via Google search.

When Google decides the breadcrumb feature will enhance the users’ experience, clickable trail links that reflect the website hierarchy will appear. The new feature provides users with information about the physical location of a webpage relative to the site as a whole, allowing them to backtrack if required.

The Google Blog states: “By analysing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.”

What do you think? Will the new Google breadcrumb feature help click through rates?