Hatton Marketing

Google UK’s MD, Matt Brittin was interviewed on the Jeremy Vine show recently. Whilst the interview was replete with Vine’s usual wonderful generalisations and attempts to stir up controversy where none exists, there were some interesting snippets.

While he was being asked how Google works out which site to show for the search query ‘hedgehogs’ he mentioned one of the criteria as to how high a site ranked being “how many people visited the site”. This may have been a slip of the tongue, but this isn’t usually considered a ranking factor – highly ranked sites would probably have more visitors because they were higher up the rankings than another site, but not the other way round. Or is this something new…?

Vine asked whether including the word “sex” in a site would help drive traffic to a Birmingham Plumber’s site as lots of people searched for this term. Brittin (obviously) said it wouldn’t help and doubted whether the word was searched for as much as Vine thought, though a pig farmer then phoned in to say that he was a red blooded male and searched for sex a lot. Quite what that proved, we’ve no idea.

There was a lot of discussion about Google’s responsibility for removing results which legally shouldn’t be available – examples such as Baby P’s mother’s name when it shouldn’t have been in the public domain, and how long news stories persist on Google and on the internet. Vine was worried that results could be up there “for a million years” to which Brittin replied that by then there may be “another search engine” returning the results. Sites which include illegal content would be taken down immediately, said Brittin, though it would depend on the laws of the country in which Google operated.

A caller asked “how much energy does each Google search take?” (referring back to this story http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134... in January which estimated that 2 searches generated the same amount of CO2 as boiling a kettle). Brittin said that 5 searches a day for a year would require the same power as a load of washing. Who’d have thought it?

Finally, another caller talked about her dog-grooming website going up and down the rankings – and Google needed to take some responsibility for the impact of their indexing on small businesses. It wasn’t quite clear whether she was referring to natural or AdWords rankings, but we were heartened by the advice Brittin gave her – to talk to a specialist Search Marketing Agency who would be able to help.