subject: Google Instant: Fewer Changes to SEO than the Average Algo Update [print this page] 880,000 Search Visits Analyzed 880,000 Search Visits Analyzed
Conductor released some nice research from anonymized data of sites on their software platform making a compelling case:
If Conductor keeps putting out this kind of stuff, they'll be a "must-read" in no time
Hmm... Looks pretty darn similar to me. A tiny increase in 4, 5 and 6 word phrases would seem to go against many of the prognostications and fears that this move would decimate the long tail (though, to be fair, plenty of savvier search folks predicted a slight increase as Google's "Suggest"function would be more obvious/visible to searchers and push them to perform more specific queries).
Data from 10,000 More Searches
Matt Bennett at MEC blogged some data from 5 sites in his purvue representing about 10,000 searches. He shared this excellent graph (similar to the one above):
That's more evidence to suggest this is a very subtle change (if there's any at all) in keyword demand.
Google SearchTraffic for SEOmoz & OpenSite Explorer
While I don't have as much data to share as Conductor, I can show you some tidbits from SEOmoz.
Here's SEOmoz.org's traffic from Google in the past week compared to the week prior:
And here's a similar look at OpenSiteExplorer's Google traffic:
There's a suspiciously small amount of change in the keyword demand, and although these are certainly un-representative of the broader web, we can be relatively confident that lots and lots of folks in our industry, performing queries that might lead them to these two sites, have awareness of and are using Google Instant.
One change that did catch my eye (thanks to some Tweets on the topic) is that Google's Suggest itself seems to have changed a bit:
Google Instant: Fewer Changes to SEO than the Average Algo Update
