📰 🚨 A New "Best Of" SERP Feature -- The SEM Daily: 5.2.23
Google rolled out a very unfriendly search results feature
This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.
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Today I’m sharing with you a new SERP feature that Google has rolled out.
Below the ads but above all the organic content Google is now displaying a series of columns with accordion functionality around “Best X” keywords—like this for “Best CRMs” query:
I first saw this when Ross Hudgens from Siege media posted about it on Twitter:
My Take
Oh great, another thing taking clicks away from website—just what we all needed!
As Glen Allsopp pointed out downthread, the way this is set up isn’t really a great user experience. If you want to be taken to SalesForce to check it out (since it is listed as a popular CRM) clicking the drop-down arrow merely shows you all the places that mentioned SalesForce as one of the top CRMs instead of putting you through to SalesForce directly.
Which feels like an odd choice, but whatever.
TBH this feels like—and go ahead and call me paranoid, I won’t be able to hear you through my large and stylish tinfoil hat—this feels like Google taking a swing at affiliate blogging, which I imagine they HATE (based on, you know, the state of the SERPs in general).
But the real nail in the coffin here, for me, is their list of “Best SEO Newsletters:”
There are a lot of really amazing SEO newsletters not in these results, but I am personally insulted. NOW IT’S PERSONAL, GOOGLE. How dare you didn’t include my daily SEO newsletter that is new and isn’t mentioned anywhere online and has no right to be on this list yet.
ATTACKED.
So yeah, please write a “Best SEO Newsletters” post on your highly authoritative marketing blog and include me.
To wrap it up:
I agree with Ross: this new SERP feature makes it ESSENTIAL to be mentioned in as many places as possible.
It’ll be interesting to see how this new feature evolves.
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Until tomorrow…
Sean Markey
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