You can’t help breathing in with slight trepidation when Google announce a new feature for their Chrome browser. And with the impending introduction of Instant Pages, worry pains are being felt again throughout the SEO consultancy world.
They are masters at taking the position of net guardians; the gate keepers who’ll never sleep until the internet is almost hallowed ground, and where ecommerce is conducted under a banner of trust and comradeship.
And whereas some might call Google’s constant fiddling (enhancing they would say) with the search dynamics of users is a good thing, others would argue that every change is always with their own business model in mind.
Perhaps that’s a little unfair, but when the recent Panda update came out, you could hear the stricken cries of website owners and webmasters throughout the land.
The ambition behind Instant Pages is commendable; almost instantaneous downloading of sites using something called pre-rendering which the computer games industry has relied on for years. It basically means something already downloaded and set to go.
It will speed up download times for websites and it will make the user happy, especially with those sites – beloved by the newspapers – which see every bit of website real estate as a chance to fill it with videos, adverts and any other device they can think of, in order to keep the ether busy with the tittle tattle of the day.
But, how will Instants Pages effect overall search dynamics, and are the rules about to be tweaked again, in Google’s favour? Let’s wait and see.