On Friday, my client was sitting neatly in position two for a very competitive search phrase “Furniture” and so I enjoyed my weekend looking forward to seeing the analytics on Monday. However, I was in for a shock when I checked the search engine results pages (Serps) for my targeted phrases. My client was nowhere to be found in the top 10, in fact none of my client’s competitors were even in the top ten, instead it was loaded full of shopping engines including Amazon, PriceGrabber, Bizrate, Yahoo Shopping, Ebay, and Overstock. There was a change that is directed towards sending Googlers directly to these engines versus directly to the actual furniture provider’s websites.

There are several theories as to why I think Google may have done this. First, Google claims to want to send their searches to the most relevant pages and perhaps Google feels that during the holiday season, people want to use these comparison shopping engines versus actually shopping directly from the manufacturer and feel that they are providing better results by doing this. That is the Google friendly theory. Another less Google Friendly theory is that a lot of these companies that had great visibility in Google no longer do and at the worst timing, just in time for the holiday season. What are these companies going to do? Adwords of course! Now that these companies don’t have the visibility they need from the natural results, they will have to pay to gain visibility through the Adwords search network and pay Google for every click thus significantly increasing Google’s revenue off this particular industry.

There are several other reasons this may have happened as well and as of now, I can only speculate. I will be reviewing several other industries to see if this change is consistent but I am most familiar with the Furniture industry which is why I was able to immediately see a major change in the SERPs. If you know who was ranking in top 10 for other industries and just saw a huge change to favor these giants as well, I would love to hear from you.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 5:47 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.