Malcolm Coles posted about the new featured in Google.com where suggested brands are displayed at the top of the results. Each brand then links to a new search with the brand added to the original search.

Here are some interesting examples.

Smartphones – No sign of the iPhone

Game Consoles – No XBox

Condoms – Yes even for them

Laptops – At Last apple shows

Learnings from this,

1. Become a brand – easier said than done
2. If your an online retailer look to improve your brand phrase e.g. sony TV’s, sony Laptops, sony camera, as the searches should increase if they are being displayed as a suggested search.

Big news yesterday was the news that Google will be having a bit of a rejig with some ‘parts under the hood’ and for the first time they’ll released a test version of the search engine for webmaster’s and SEO’s to play about with.

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ allows you to search the new index which does have some slight alterations to the rankings. They are looking for feedback on the results given out before they go live which is an excellent idea to improve the overall results being given. For example Dave Naylor pointed out a problem with a 301′d result in the serp for SEO.

I’ve noticed that my result on my football blog “Blackpool FC” which is currently at 7 have moved down to 21 in the results with many bigger brand sites appearing in the rankings with inner page rankings e.g. amazon, wikipedia, facebook, youtube, eurosport, bbc.

One thing that are still in the results are domains / inner pages that 302 to another page. This isn’t something new as Matt Cutts showed with his experiment when he changed domain a few months ago and Google ranked the temporary domain.

In my example this inner page is ranking 2nd page for Blackpool FC.

It 302′s to a different domain.

This is very common throughout the UK serps allowing webmasters to get 100′s of domains ranking with only one website. It will be interesting to see if this is something that changes considering the very public related experiment by Matt Cutts.