Google Stars

Today's blog post over at google relays yet another improvement to the Webmaster Tools interface which has seen some steady improvements over the past few weeks.



Today's post includes average positions of the keywords you're tracking, and interestingly, a tab showing starred results form your logged in starred pages. Oh, and they've taken off the word "top" from your search queries. This information (although remember not 100% accurate) can help with checking some of your keywords that you're targeting. You can see the number of impressions, the clickthrough rate and then the average position. Maybe you're stressing to be top 3 for a certain keyword which isn't actually receiving as many impressions as you think it would. And maybe even then, the clickthrough rate is poor.

What's interesting to me, is that they've dedicated a whole tab to starred results. I'm not sure exactly how many people use this feature - you have to be logged in to star a page - and many people who are logged in and know what the star is are savvy enough to remember a particular site anyway. The implications are of course with personalised search, which is default nowadays.

Patrick over at Blogstorm has been testing this method recently to find out whether this starred method could affect organic results, and if you haven't already taken part in his little experiment, I suggest you do - the more results the better we can understand if there might be a small impact. Unless (as a couple of comments have suggested) Google gets wind, and scuppers the plans just to annoy us all!!

I remember thinking that when searchwiki was launched, if it was that easy to game, people would create bots and programs to mark up results. I can't see the star system being much different (Google just want's to be seen as fresh as Facebook's "I like this" buttons?), but we'll have to wait and see.

Are you looking to improve rankings in the search results? I can help. Get in tough with me at Barcelona SEO and we can chat about the possibilities. If you're looking for instant traffic, then I can also help with AdWords managment and training (or other pay per click campaigns).