Google announced an addition to its mobile search results that will give people quick access to what the company feels are searchers’ “favorite” websites.
The announcement reads as follows:
“Whether you are looking for Pinterest pins, Vines, Houzz idea books or Food Network recipes, you can now browse through more content from your favorite websites within Google search results on your mobile device.”
This content will be housed in a carousel that searchers can swipe through and tap on to view whichever links they find interesting.
Whether or not this ends up being a benefit to searchers remains to be seen. One audience it will almost assuredly not benefit are content creators that already rank for terms which trigger Google’s new mobile carousel.
This is similar in a way to Google’s answer cards that give searchers the information they’re looking for immediately without having them click through to other sites.
Now, instead of searchers clicking through to results in organic listings, they may be more apt to click on the results in the new mobile carousel .
Google has given no indication how as to how it will determine which content ends up in the carousel. Is there an algorithm in place that’s similar to organic search results? Or will Google hand select the content from a limited number of sources?
There are plenty of unanswered questions after reading Google’s curiously vague announcement. It will be interesting to see how many publishers, if any, end up seeing a decline in their organic mobile traffic as a result of this update.
Image Credit: Denys Prykhodov / Shutterstock.com
