Google Chrome, SEO, and Google Suggestions
With the release of Chrome, I automatically started to think about how the new Google web browser will affect search engine optimization. After using it for a few minutes it became obvious.
Chrome has a built in default feature which suggests alternative and refined search terms. For example, when I searched for “Jerusalem Hotels” I got the alternatives shown below.
This search for “Jerusalem Hotels”, illustrates how Chrome will influence the importance of certain search phrases.
Chrome will influence searches in 2 ways
- The alternative suggestions offered by Chrome will no doubt become more important keywords since they are now getting added exposure
- Misspellings of keywords will become less important since Chrome automatically corrects spelling and some people will click on the suggestions.
How can Chrome influence the search space if it has so few users now?
I can think of 2 reasons:
- The number of Chrome users will likely increase
- The alternative suggestion Chrome feature just became a default on Google search called Google Suggest
After 4 years in Google Labs, my guess is that Google decided to make Google Suggest the default in order to make sure it worked properly before making it part of Chrome.
It is interesting to compare the feature on Chrome to the Google Suggest feature shown below. Google Suggest has the same first 3 suggestions as the Chrome browser. However it has more suggestions and also shows the number of results available.
Google Suggest has graduated and is now part of Google Search
For some reason it doesn’t show the number of results for the original search term typed in by the user. In many cases the number of results is not useful. Does it matter if there are 591,000 results or 367,000 results?
On a local note, it is interesting to note that even though the Google development team that worked on Google Suggest is located a few minutes from my office in Haifa, Israel, it doesn’t work on the local interface — Google.co.il – in Hebrew or English
Tags: Chrome Keywords, Chrome SEO, Google Chrome, Google Suggest, Google.co.il, Jerusalem Hotels
September 5th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
[…] a thousand times waiting for Chrome to go live. I’ve had two days to play with it. Its SEO ramifications are a hot topic but I held off because I wanted that extra play time. One thing SEO gurus often […]
September 17th, 2008 at 2:17 am
there are so many advantages and features with Chrome, such as it’s speed, for example; now if only they would take care it’s quirky cookie management…
October 1st, 2008 at 10:08 am
I agree with your 2 points about “Chrome will influence searches”.
I had some discussions on forums regarding the influence and ramifications this will have on SEO work regarding the keywords users’ type. The opinions of both professional SEO’s and the general users were split and it was interesting to see how different people felt of what this will mean now it terms of search and what new changes they will need to adopt to their SEO work to keep the websites high on the search engines.
In particular it was interesting to read the postings of SEO professional dismissing the suggested keywords that appears in the search results and believing that the “typical searcher” will ignore the suggested keywords.
January 30th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
I know it’s been a while since this article but I just found it while Googling, one of the coolest things about the search suggestions is it’s a great way to find related keywords. We’ve actually automated it in the Chrome SEO extension so you can generate huge keyword lists.