Columnist Pratik Dholakiya explores current search trends and speculates on where the industry might be headed in 2018.
Pratik Dholakiya on January 11, 2018 at 12:04 pm
We’re already over a week into 2018, and the start of a new year is a
great time to check in and see where we stand as an industry — and how
things might change this year.
Prepare for fake news algorithm updates
Back in 2010, Google was getting beaten up in the media for the
increasing amount of “content farm” clutter in the search results. That
negative press was so overwhelming that Google felt it had no choice but
to respond:
[We] hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.
Soon after that, in February 2011, the Google Panda update was released, which specifically targeted spammy and low-quality content.
Why do I bring this up today? Because the media has been hammering Google for promoting fake news for the past year and a half — a problem so extensive that search industry expert Danny Sullivan has referred to it as “Google’s biggest-ever search quality crisis.”
Needless to say, these accusations are hurting Google’s image in ways
that cut far deeper than content farms. While the problem of rooting
out false information is a difficult one, it is one that Google has a
great deal of motivation to solve.
Google has already taken action to combat the issue in response to the negative press, including banning publishers who were promoting fake news ads, testing new ways for users to report offensive autocomplete suggestions, adjusting their algorithm to devalue “non-authoritative information” (such as Holocaust denial sites), and adding “fact check” tags to search results.
Of course, the issue of trustworthy search results has been on
Google’s radar for years. In 2015, researchers from Google released a
paper on Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT),
a way of evaluating the quality of web pages based on their factual
accuracy rather than the number of inbound links. If implemented, the
Knowledge-Based Trust system would ultimately demote sites that
repeatedly publish fake news (although there is a potential for it to go
wrong if the incorrect facts become widely circulated).
Whether the Knowledge-Based Trust method is enough to combat fake
news — or if some version of it has already been implemented without
success — is difficult to say. But, it’s clear that Google is interested
in making truthfulness a ranking factor, and they’ve never had a
stronger motivation to do so than now.
Voice search and featured snippets will grow hand-in-hand
One in five mobile search queries currently comes from voice search —
a number that is likely to rise as Google Assistant-enabled devices
such as Google Home continue to grow in popularity. And as voice search
grows, we can expect to see an increase in featured snippets, from which
Google often sources its voice search results.
Indeed, there is already evidence that this growth is taking place. A study
released by Stone Temple Consulting last year confirmed that featured
snippets are on the rise, appearing for roughly 30 percent of the 1.4
million queries they tested.
If this trend continues, featured snippets may even begin to rival
the top organic listing as the place to be if you want to get noticed.
(For more on featured snippets and how to target them, check out Stephan
Spencer’s excellent primer on the subject.)
Source:
https://searchengineland.com/
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