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Googlebox Mini

Googlebox mini and SEO what is the potential?

         

Munster

9:25 am on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



A company I work for has just got a Googlebox mini to provide quality product search on their site.

Now, I know nothing about this product but I started to wonder how this might help us in our SEO efforts.

I do understand that this product really is not intended to enhance listings in Google propper but I was wondering if it will be linked in any way to Google, i.e. will it tell google all about all of the pages that it contains.

Any other suggestions as to how this box may be used for SEO improvement?

Nial

Munster

3:12 pm on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Anyone had any experience with Googlebox mini?

SteveJohnston

3:24 pm on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



The presumption I am working on - and yes I have been involved with one deployment on a large retail site - is that the algorithm in the Google Mini is sufficiently similar to the main Google algo that the ranking of pages internally within the site, against target expressions, will help us assess which pages Google will consider most relevant from the site when it pulls them into a Google site search.

We have nothing conclusive yet in terms of actual results, but we are working to make sure that the pages we want to be considered most relevant to particular queries are being presented first in the internal site search for the same expression.

I think that just about makes sense.

Steve

Lord Majestic

3:43 pm on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Steve

Do you get ability to make changes to ranking of pages with that device? Ie: assign more or less points to close proximity matches in different areas of the document?

SteveJohnston

7:03 pm on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Sadly, no.

You get the option to create the equivalent to sponsored links - i.e. promoted pages against particular keywords - and the ability to present related categories.

Steve

Lord Majestic

7:24 pm on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



So in effect you have zero control over how documents should be ranked, its all black box kind of thing?

Does its own default rank work well for your purposes?

SteveJohnston

7:55 pm on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Yes that's it, a black box.

And yes, the results have been fantastic. Product database of 20,000 lines with a couple of hundred supporting pages and the performance and relevance have been astonishingly good for the investment. In the UK Google Mini is less than £2,000, and the implementation is very straightforward. Best £2,000 that has ever been spent on the site in question.

Steve

Lord Majestic

8:44 pm on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Do you actually have to crawl your own site, or does it allow to provide a feed with data? If its feed then in what format do you provide - html?

RockyB

8:51 pm on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I believe the box acts the same as the GoogleBot, and crawls the site.

kgormat

2:54 am on Oct 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Does the mini have a facility to allow the visitor to sort the results by fields such as brand, price, etc? I assume it does not, but it would be nice if it did.

shri

4:10 am on Oct 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



That would be a froogle box. ;)