From Today’ NY Times:

Op-Ed Contributor – Search, but You May Not Find – NYTimes.com: “Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing have become the Internet’s gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include ‘search neutrality’: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.”

It looks like Foundem’s founder Adam Raff is on a tear. He’s also started the website and blog, SearchNeutrality.org which further supports his position he wrote about in the Times.

He makes some great points. Good for Adam for getting this in front of the world via the Times.

Google definitely has the amazing and unprecedented ability to own any market it wishes by simply pinning their own resource at the top search result.

After reading this, I can’t help but think that Search Neutrality is inevitable. What do you think?

If you haven’t been paying attention, Google’s been busy experimenting with showing product images and shopping results more prominently in search results.

Yesterday Adam Viener posted an eye-opening screenshot of Google Search results. A search for USB extension cable showed search results containing a very skewed list of search results.

In Adam’s example, PC Connection’s products garnered three top spots in the sponsored listings. From Adam’s perspective as a search affiliate, this raises some questions about the availability of ad space to businesses like his.

Here’s another example where Zappos pwns the search results page.

Angel Djambazov asked Google Affiliate Network team about the recent changes to the search results page and got the following response:

We can confirm that the product listing ads beta discussed in Adam’s piece is being facilitated by the Google Affiliate Network platform. At Google, we’re constantly experimenting with new features, tools and visual representations to improve the user experience and usefulness of our ads. In accordance with that philosophy, we’re beta testing a new format to show richer product information, including images, prices and product titles in the ads for shopping-related queries. This test is part of a limited beta and not available to all advertisers at this time.

What do you think of these trends?

A few years ago, I wrote about what I called “Soft SEO“. I feel that there are squishier things that the all-knowing Google uses for ranking websites.

In addition to the all-important onsite (meta data, keyword-rich content, header tags) and offsite (inbound links, authoritative mentions) there is likely more to what matters in getting your site to be amongst the top ten of all websites in the world for any given search result.

I guess that google is also paying close attention to bounce rates and time on site. If people click on a search result and quickly return for another, then it must not have been a good experience.

And down it goes.

I haven’t read anything specific to validate these thoughts, though I have seen anecdotal evidence to support these theories (though that’s all they are).

Anthropomorphizing Google

When we work on the SEO for our websites, we often give Google human characteristics. We treat it like a intelligent being. But not too intelligent. We frequently have discussions about our websites and their structure that contain terms like, “We’re confusing Google with this,” and “Let’s be patient. It’s digesting all the changes, it needs to sort it all out.”

Anthropomorphizing Google (or thinking of Google’s systems as “human”) helps us get above the simple algorithmic thinking about how many keywords and links are required and more toward the advanced multi-variate factors that all contribute to good search engine rankings. Since Google won’t tell us what the factors actually are, if we treat the search engine like a thinking being, what’s important to Google and what’s important to users converge.

And that’s a good thing.

What is Google Actually Telling us?

If you pay attention to what the folks at Google ARE saying, you can start to get the idea that they are looking at many different ways to determine the value of a website.

Today, Google announced that site hierarchies display in search results. Clearly they’re looking at how navigation works in a website, and now they’re displaying navigation in search results in some cases instead of URLs.

What if they can’t make sense of your site structure? It’s not the end of the world, but it certainly isn’t helping your case.

And recently, there’s been lots of discussion over something that Matt Cutts said about site speed and performance in an interview.

How long before Google’s telling us how long it takes for our pages to load in their Webmaster tools? Slow sites cause unhappy users and bounces. And Google’s paying attention.

In the past several months, it seems that it has been really easy for publishers to get top placement in google with some pretty basic keyword stuffing strategies, like buying domains with exact targeted keyword phrases in them, or worse.

Google preaches, design for users and the rest will follow, but these examples make that really difficult to swallow, and does nothing but encourage the opposite behavior.

Keyword Stuffed Domains

We saw this over and over again this year in the halloween costume space, like this site ranks #1 in Google for Alice in Wonderland Costume

And this site ranks number 2 for Pirate Costume in google.

There are dozens if not hundreds of that specific example, and they made a killing this year. (They’re a merchant, not an affiliate btw.)

They may not last at the top spots much longer, but they probably don’t even care. Mission accomplished.

I’m not judging the sites in question. I do have to wonder if this is really what Google wants at the top of their search results. (OK, maybe I’m judging a little.)

Spam Blogs and Redirects

Here’s another, dkny accalia, which is a certain model of shoe.

The sites in spots 2 and 3 both redirect to the same website. Spots 4 through 8 are broken sites, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that they were also doing the same (based on the domains).

Redirects? Seriously? We don’t know what these domains had on them before to get these ranks, but there’s little doubt in my mind that they were keyword stuffing. Actually the 8th site has a Google cached page, it’s a spammy wordpress blog. That DNKY Accalia post was from October 5th.

They got the ranks within a few weeks and then redirect it to an affiliate landing page, in this case with links to Amazon.

Where are the Good Guys?

Where’d the guys end up that design for users?

Oh here they are on Page 2…

I wonder how Stylefeeder, theFind, like.com, ProntoStyle, BizRate, etc. feel about their White-hat ways when stuff like this happens for even a few weeks in the prime holiday shopping season.

What’s going on?

Will these guys stay in these spots forever? Probably not (though the costume guys have been holding on for months now).

Is Google under so much pressure to produce real-time search results that they’re leaving the back door open again to spammers?