We've talk about SEO tips for Google Instant in the past but things change and Google's autocompletions algorithm within Google Instant has changed over the past six months.
A WebmasterWorld thread is discussing new techniques that you may be able to use to "optimize" for the autocompletions within Google Instant - also known as Google Suggest.
One SEO claimed the algorithms has changed so much that he doesn't feel it is even worthwhile to try to go after Google Instant autocompletions anymore. He said:
I had a campaign last year that netted me $45,000 but recently Google changed its algo or manually edited the autocomplete for my sector. It's a neater subset. But I don't think I'll bother in the future. I assume the algo will have some special scrutiny for every major autocomplete phrase if it doesn't already.
If you can rank for the autocompletions, you can make a lot of money. So why is it hard to do so now?
Tedster said they have become much more localized and geotargetted.
Search suggestions are intensively geo-targeted, showing different choices in different geographies, sometimes even down to the zip code level! That's going to be difficult to take into account if it affects your chosen terms.
When a client of prospective client of his loses a nice chunk of traffic, one of the main things he looks at is not the SEO but if Google Instant changed the search suggestions for the query they lost traffic for. And they do often enough.
Have you noticed drastic changes to the suggestions/autocompletes in Google Instant?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
