I have spoken in the past about how the major search engines, notably Google and Bing, have made clear their desire to become search engines of verbs rather than of nouns. For those that aren’t as geeky about grammar as me, nouns are naming words attributed to people, animals, places, things and other abstract ideas. Verbs, on the other hand, are words that convey actions or a state of being, words such as run, walk, swim etc. are verbs. So, I hear you ask in collective befuddlement, how exactly are we moving from a web of nouns to a web of verbs, and what difference is it going to make to search engine optimisation? It’s quite a complex theory, so I’ll try and break it down simply.
A Web of Nouns versus a Web of Verbs
In an interview at Stone Temple Consulting, Bing’s Stefan Weitz discussed this theory much more eloquently than I will be able to, but if you stick with me, I’ll try to be as articulate as possible. Anyway, caveat over; to understand this shift from nouns to verbs, we must first understand how the web itself was originally structured.
The web originally started as collection of text based pages connected by textual links. These links often included anchor text that specified or helped identify the particular page that they were linking to. This is the system that helped the search engines function, by allowing them to crawl and index the web, and serving people relevant results by matching the query they entered with the webpage that has the most links with relevant or matching anchor text pointing to it.
To illustrate how this functioned, I’ll use an example of a fictional Hotel Comparison website. The domain of this fictitious website might be ‘www.easyhotels.com‘, but the search engines can see that it has millions of links pointing to it with the anchor text ‘Hotel Comparisons‘. This enables the search engines to make the connection that when a user enters the query ‘Hotel Comparisons‘, the most relevant site for them is going to be ‘www.easyhotels.com‘. But what this system also did is make users search for something else, rather than their objective, this is the basis of the web of nouns.
Traditionally, rather than search for something like ‘New York Hotel Comparisons and booking’, we might have been content to simply search for ‘Hotel Comparisons’, or ‘New York Hotel bookings’ because either we didn’t trust the results, or we didn’t think the search engines could process the request. So, despite the intent of our request being based on an action (a verb), we reverted to the navigational, or noun based model of the web. This was years, perhaps even a decade ago, and now the web is evolving to become to become based on actions, rather than navigations.
Still with me? Probably not…well, if you are you deserve a medal, but I’ll carry on regardless. The search engines now are now able to understand nuances in search queries, and analyse previous search history and geospatial factors to deliver more action-based results that might satisfy the intent that caused us to conduct that search in the first place. If we now search for ‘New York Hotel Comparisons’ on Google, the first paid link is for a booking website, because if we are comparing hotels in New York, it is likely that we might want to complete a booking at one of those hotels. However, the most interesting feature of these SERPs are near the top of the organic results:
These aren’t paid listings, they are organic, natural results, that feature reviews, and a room price. We can also see (below) that when we expand one of the links, we have the option to compare more prices when we factor in booking fees and taxes. All this can be done despite not having to leave Google:
So, when searching for ‘New York Hotel Comparisons’, rather than having to navigate from comparison website, to booking website, it is all listed for us directly in the SERPs, because Google has understood that the intent behind that search is likely to lead to us booking a hotel in New York.
I’m afraid at this point I’ll have to deviate slightly from my point about a web of nouns versus a web of verbs to discuss an issue that some other s have previously raised, not necessarily a flaw in the system, but certainly a question over Google’s commitment to fair play and where exactly their ethics lie. Imagine you want to start a hotel comparison website, or you have started one in the last year. Do you think it’s going to be possible to outrank competitors organic results, let alone Google’s own product, with your new website, no matter the value of the content, or the quality of the user experience. I would hedge my bets that it would be very difficult; particularly as Google have the ability to tweak the algorithms to favour their own products, and the resources to heavily advertise their own campaigns and to generate huge quantities of links.
I’ve never really been one to question Google’s motives with too much scrutiny, but the way that more and more of their products are filtering into the organic listings is going to harm the businesses that rely on ranking highly to make money. This is the case when Google+ posts outrank the original content (even when the author searches for it), and it supports the argument that Google are becoming incredibly bias towards large, well-established brands.
The evolution of the web of nouns into the web of verbs is well under way, but it could be argued that the way Google are exploiting this to promote their own products is harming the way modern businesses use search engines. It’s now possible to book nearly an entire holiday without leaving the SERPs, particularly with the recent growth of Google Flights, and some claim that this is going beyond lacking in ethics, to damaging entire industries that have, in the past, relied on Google to achieve online success. It’s an interesting point of debate, and I’d really love to get your thoughts on the subject, so any comments would be welcome.
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
