Paying Attention to Google Suggest

Google continually launches many features to enhance the search experience of the users. Though some of the features at superficial levels may look harmless and seem helpful for the users, taking a closer look at these features will reveal shocking information. One such feature to which you should pay attention is Google Suggest.

Google Suggest has been designed to help the internet users to find the information quickly. This reduces the amount of typing the users have to do while making a search. When you have this feature enabled, when you start typing your search phrase, Google will give you suggestions based on the first few characters that you have typed. You just need to select from the suggested list and hit enter. Though this is a useful feature, this does not always work exactly the way it should. Some times, it pulls out some ugly stuff, which you may not want to see along with your brand name.

As a webmaster, it is not enough that you keep a tab on your website’s reputation just in social media alone. You now also have this additional burden of having to keep track of what Google Suggest is suggesting your target customers. If you are wondering how it can damage your reputation or how it can affect your brand, read on.

Let us assume that a certain user is making a search using your brand name. For example the user is searching for ‘TravelMtX’ (a fictional name), when you start typing your brand name, the suggestions from Google may include “TravelMtX scam”, “TravelMtX issues”, etc., and it will affect your reputation very badly. Even if there are other positive suggestions from Google, if the negative ones are going to be listed on top, then the immediate inclination of the users is to check the negative results first and this can have a very bad impact on your brand.

Most webmasters are not even aware that damage can be caused to their brand in the above fashion. The next question that you are likely to have is, even if I am aware of this issue how do I stop Google from showing these negative suggestions. If you are thinking of contacting Google with the intention of removing your negative suggestions, you should know that unfortunately, it is not going to work. You should rather first identify the source of these negative suggestions. The negative suggestions flow from the actual entries on the web; Google does not generate these negative results or any suggestion for that matter from vacuum. If you want to get rid of the negative suggestions, then you should first work on removing the actual entries from the social media and other sources. Once you remove these negative entries, Google will slowly start forgetting the negative suggestions. If you fail to pay attention to Google Suggest results, you will gradually be losing your customers but without knowing the reason why your traffic is dwindling. So this is not an area that you can easily overlook.

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