Google has been busy this year with several small changes to the search results being made a various times throughout the year. Basically what they have been doing is trying to devalue organic listings and make PPC listing more valuable (after all this is how they make their money).
So what have they done? Well for a start the organic listing have been crammed into a smaller space with them now just taking up half the width of a page (before it was 3/4). This lead to more people clicking on PPC ads, which generates more money for Google.
The next change was to add a map into certain searches (eg hotels in edinburgh brings up a map with 10 hotels in edinburgh on a map). The map started small at the top of the page but it has now been enlarged so that you now have to scroll to view the first organic listing. This means that the click rate for the top listing will be decreased.
These changes all are aimed at making organic listings less valuable, it begs the question what is the next step? If Google had their way we would pay for every click, after all then they would make more money. It makes you wonder if there is a future for organic listing and SEO techniques. It used to be that only 30% of searchers used PPC listing but i get the feeling that will be rising steadily over the years which mean the big companies are going to be dominating search results and the smaller ones will probably disappear, which is a shame as the internet was a great medium for new starts competing against the big guns.
