After One Month of Google Instant, Are You Feeling the Change? I Didn’t Think So.

Now that you’ve had a month to digest Google Instant, here’s a question for you: has anything really changed?

Sure, you may have found that the “instant” results that pop up in mid-type are, in fact, quite helpful to you, and maybe you’ve actually saved a little time every day if you do a lot of searches.

But other than that, have you noticed? That’s right -- search as we know it is just like it was a month ago! There was no huge SEO Armageddon as announced by virtually every columnist who’d barely had time to play with Google Instant before they predicted “The End of Search As We Know It.”

Which of course, it wasn’t.

That sure didn’t keep them from speculating, though. Why let a couple days worth of research stand in the way of a deadline? Here are links to three people with month-old egg on their face:

“This kills the need to bid on long-tail keywords.” (Oh, really?)

“Make sure you have a page ranked for all the important variations. Show up, no matter what final keyword string the searcher commits to.” (Uh, no.)

“What they really did is kill SEO.” (Yeah, right.)

It got so bad that Google had to put out a press release to let people know that no, Google Instant wasn’t going to change how you planned your SEO strategy; it was exactly what it appeared to be – an effort to save people a little time. Period.

That’s right, Google was merely doing something nice.

Here at Secret Underground Headquarters where I work, it may surprise you (although probably not) to know that when Google Instant went live, sure, we all got on to see what the excitement was about. And the general consensus was what you might expect in a business largely staffed by computer geeks: “Cool.”

We didn’t immediately assemble into the conference room with poison Kool-Aid, like all the SEO columnists seem to do every time Google announces that someone in research just went to the bathroom. We didn’t start wondering if our clients were going to leave in droves, because we know that most of them are too busy running their businesses to worry about an improvement that Google made to their search capabilities. That’s what they hire us for. They know we keep a cool head and actually understand link building and search, so they don’t have to. And we knew when we looked at it that Google Instant wouldn’t change anything overnight. Or over a month.

We’re still here, like we were a month ago, helping our clients to get the rankings they need. We use Google thousands of times a day and it’s safe to say we appreciate the suggestive help from Google Instant. But you can be sure that the next major announcement that comes out of Google is not going to make us blow a gasket. We know better. I know better. And so should you.

Next time, maybe cooler heads will prevail in the press. But don’t get your hopes up.