Hello Everyone,

A quick one today just to let you all know that Google recently announced they will be making their Google Suggest project live on Google.com in the next week.

What does this mean for all of us? I would say mixed blessings.

On one hand we can start to eliminate misspellings and poorly ordered keyword strings even more than before. This means more people will be landing on some of those juicy long tailed keywords that we all love targeting so much and coming through to your various sites.

On the other hand Google suggest will help eliminate really long tailed keywords by funneling them all into a few long tailed words. Good news if you already rank for those terms bad news if you don’t.

Now you can point the finger and say I am sprouting conspiracy theories but I think this “feature” will help Google control it’s SERPs more. Here is why;

• People will eventually begin relying on suggest, just like they rely on Google already
• Once they do Google can “suggest” the most “popular” terms from their database
• This could mean they suggest the most popular terms
• Or maybe they will suggest terms with the highest adwords CPC?
• Indirectly terms that they consistantly “suggest” will become more compeitive increasing CPC on them
• Terms with unfavoured sites SEO’ing their way up can be effictively “kicked” out of a result by tweaking the suggestions.
• Gradually big sites will claim all the suggested terms yet again forcing the small webmaster out of the natural SERPs.

OK, this feature will help users and don’t get me wrong, Yahoo already do it and their is no proof they are abusing the system, i’m just pointing out what could be, keep you eyes closely on that suggest box and your keyword traffic over the next few months.

Aaron Wall wrote an indepth analysis of how he thinks it will effect SEO and search behaviour, give that a read too if you have time.