I will be speaking at the VRMA Eastern Seminar in Myrtle Beach next week.

The 17th Annual Vacation Rental Management Association Eastern Seminar focuses on providing information to improve the operation of a vacation rental management company.

My session will be a SEO Site Clinic. I am joined by Trent Blizzard, Blizzard Internet Marketing. We will be evaluating sites web sites and making suggestions to enhance search engine optimization.

If you are attending the conference, please stop by and say “hi”.

See you in Myrtle Beach!

In the early stages of Google, the search results were clean and simple. In fact, that is what made it so brilliant. While Yahoo covered your page with ads, images, and personalization, people preferred the simplistic approach to Google.

Google is fading away from what they were so good at: Simplicity.

On March 3rd Google announced “teleporting”, search within a search. The concept allows users to search within a website directly from the Google search engine results page (SERP).

Amazon Example

Ultimately it’s just another dirty beer can on the Google highway. As several have pointed out already, it is flawed and unnecessary.

301 Confusion

Dave Dugdale (of RentVine.com) recently pointed out one flaw with the search-within-a-search.

Although, this is probably not a major flaw, because eventually it should find it’s way to the new site. However, it does bring up a point about deciding what sites to use this tool on and what sites not to use it on.

Unfair to the small player

Part of Google’s popularity has often been their ability to give the smaller player a chance to compete against the big name brands.

There is obviously a connection here between the popularity of the site. All sites do not have this new feature. The extra search box gives an advantage to the big time brand names. So what is the magic number to give a site it’s own search box? How many visitors a month does it take?

• Why ChicagoTribune.com and NOT AJC.com?
• Why FoodNetwork and not ESPN.com?

Clearly, there is a rhyme and reason to this… I hope. Is there a certain criteria that some sites have that the others do not?

Non-brand search terms

Searching for a dot com is one thing, but how about just keywords. Below is an example of a search for keywords instead of a brand.

Clearly this site now has a huge advantage over the competition, because Google chose to give them their own search box.

Google is constantly tweaking perfection. Although the new “features” sound like enhancements for the user’s sake, it’s not at all. It leads to more confusion and more pollution.

I am starting to miss the standard 10 Blue Links of Google.