Talking about tables

I was speaking at Engage for Search today, and after my session had the chance to sit back and enjoy the other speakers.

The session I enjoyed most was by Nilhan Jayasinghe, who is Head of Search at iCrossing in the UK. 

I liked the way that he seems happy to pose questions without having all the answers up his sleeve.  Which is reasonable, because frankly some questions are a bit tricky.

So he was talking about how Google infers relevance from what the published community is talking about and linking to.  But the published community isn't always right!

A good example is the Google search results page for 'table' - see screengrab below.

When the man in the street searches for 'table' he is thinking of a wooden object upon which he can rest his pint of beer.  But when the online community thinks about a table, more often than not they are thinking about an HTML table. 

The result - in Google's algorithmic world - is a strange situation where the natural results and paid results are about totally different subjects.

So furniture stores have two choices.  They can wait for Google to 'fix' this situation - or they can facilitate their own conversations and start building equity around their search results that way.

iCrossing are working with MoreThan on a content site - More Than Living, which is one possible solution to this.  I'm not 100% convinced, but it's certainly an interesting experiment - and it's always fantastic to see SEO companies creating useful and interesting content rather than stuffing fake blogs with keywords!