Why is Google Now Becoming a Feed?
This is an extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 21 July 2017.
Read about Google Now becoming a feed and the changes apparently coming to the Google homepage as it goes back to being iGoogle (kind of).
If you would like to discuss ways these changes to Google could impact your web business, please feel free to contact me.
#SEO #GoogleNow #NewsFeed
Google Now Becomes A Feed
Google Feed Changes Summary:
- There have been a few shifts (and a few forecast shifts) that indicate Google is planning to do its best not to let users off its platform.
- Google News Feed has had “follow” button added to it, allowing you to follow a topic without leaving anywhere else, like Feedly. This is also starting to appear in straight search.
- Google New appears to have been killed off becoming much more of a Feed of data based on things you follow, search history and other interpreted metrics.
- Finally, The Guardian has reported that the Google homepage is to take a step back to 2009 and effectively become iGoogle, with a populated homepage very similar to the Feed-replaced Google Now.
- The ecosystems are closing and we are heading towards a much less interesting and diverse web.
(Image from SE Land)
Actions to take:
- Get ready to fight for traffic. Neither Google nor Facebook really wants to give it to you.
- Implement structured data to better appear in the feeds.
- Implement AMP to better appear in Google News.
- Make sure your website is sticky, so people remember and visit outside of Facebook or Google search.
- Don’t forget to ask Google, why its homepage now looks like iGoogle from 7-8 years ago.
- Contact me if you would like to discuss ways to make sure you make it into the feed and ways to make your website sticky.
Discussion:
The ecosystems are converging. A few years ago, I posited that web channels were converging as social / search / web all started to influence each other and stopped acting like independent organisms. The same is true of the web for the next few years. Facebook and Google want to be like AOL of the late 1990s, that is a closed-system where you almost never needed to step outside to visit the actual web.
In all honesty, Google is a lot further behind Facebook in this traffic ecosystem, but it doesn’t have the screen ownership presence, which means people still have to open an app to visit Facebook to become enmeshed in it. Google on the other hand, you just click the home screen button on your phone.
I’m not surprised that Google will be taking this step. I think auto-adding things to a home screen feed comes with dangers of users getting agitated about privacy, but like a lot of their intuitive advances, it really depends on the utility and accuracy for uncomplaining adoption.
More info:
Mobile First is NOT Mobile Friendly
TL;DR
- Google Now, and other parts of its empire are becoming much more feed driven.
- Partially this will be user-driven, part automagically divined by Google.
- The aim is not to let users leave the Google ecosystem.
- Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
- Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to take advantage of them, please feel free to contact me.
