WILL GOOGLE STARS AFFECT SEO?

You might have missed the new bookmarking app by Google called Google Stars because it came down just as fast as it went up.

Google Stars (originally spotted by Google watcher Florian Kiersch (who leaked the extension to the rest of us) is the Chrome-centric reinvention of the usual bookmarking we are used to and is said to offer far more features than what we are currently using. You could add notes, share files and folders as well as have filters for auto-categorising by images, web pages and videos. It’s intended to help users save, share and categorize web content.

When the extension is installed, Chrome automatically ‘magically’ collects a history of topics you might be interested in (from previous searches and we assume it will track your future activity) and adds your current bookmarks automatically by date (but you’ll be able to rearrange these).

Before the extension was pulled from the Google web store, search engine optimisation experts like Moz and Ruby Search Solutions had time to look at the interface and observe how this may affect how Google may use their bookmarking extension to further adapt your searches.

It’s easy to see how the underlying process to determine, track and populate your favourites or bookmarks will contribute to Google’s ever increasing objective to know more about you as an individual and use that data to relay information and useful suggestions about what to see, do, eat, experience etc.

Google could therefore base the results of your search on your current frequented sites and bookmarks. Currently, bookmarking is a one-way street. We make a list of our favourite sites and the list sits there until we manually decide which of those sites we would like to use or visit again. But with Google Stars, the search engine can extract info and combine it with your general search and sort the results based on user-defined bookmarked sites, images and videos.

Does this mean that webmasters are going to start paying asking people to bookmark their sites? Or another branch of internet advertising called BookMarketing (you heard it here first folks) will emerge into the vernacular of online marketers?

Hopefully not.

What we can take away from all of this, is the over-used phrase...“content is king”. Produce quality, relevant and engaging content that people will want to bookmark and keep you or your site at the top of their favourites list.