There have been some rumors floating around about this purchase for a little while now, but as of today DealerElite.net is saying it is true.  Is it?

We are approaching a fork in the road for organic search.  Search engines are either going to become more powerful, or they’re going to shed enough leaves to make us ask whether sustaining our current investment is sound.

Google released Realtime search, Yahoo and Bing are merging, and facebook is jumping into the search game.  Those are big things, but what do they really mean?  Let’s take a few steps back for a minute.

Search engines, traditionally, look for a few things when deciding which website to serve-up in the results:

These are things that are technically done and can be quite complex depending on who you speak with.  There is a big problem with this model though:  it is highly corruptible.  Not pointing any fingers, but as an example of the corruption, SEO “experts” and “gurus” make their livings by taking advantage of this model.  For the pure fact that this model is corruptible, it will never be the true long-term ruler.  Corruption is one simple and logical reason why we’re approaching this fork.

But let’s jump down the rabbit hole a little further and talk about social media.  Yes, I know, we’re all sick of hearing about how wonderful social media is and blah, blah, blah.  But I would advise you to not stop reading just yet because I’m not here to praise it.  Social Media is not ruled by a technical system.  There is no algorithm for results.  The content is completely provided based on judgement by the people you have chosen to hear from.

Want to buy something?  Ask your friends on facebook what they think.  That is a lot trustier than some review from a stranger you might find on Yelp after being directed there by Google.

This is technology simply getting to the roots of human nature.  We place more value on the things we hear from people we know.  And we seek that higher-valued system over any other.  The big search engines see this and they’re trying to position themselves to have a future by reorganizing and adding new features.

To all our DealerRefresh readers I am sorry to say that we have watched the plight of the newspaper, the radio, we’ll see the drop of TV ads as we know them today, and we’re starting to find that this other advertising source we are just beginning to really capitalize on could find itself as an advertising “has-been”.  We are approaching a fork in the road.

The fork might be closer than I’m letting on….

From the Nielsen Wire on Top U.S. search sites for July 2010:

The number of searches conducted in the U.S. over the last year has decreased by 16% from 10.5 billion in July 2009 to 8.8 billion in July 2010. MSN/Windows Live/Bing was the only one of the top three engines to have experienced an increase in search volume – a 28% increase from 0.9 billion to 1.2 billion.

Why do you think this is?

Since Google began testing “Realtime Search,” we have seen several incarnations including a scrolling area on the main search page. With the announcement last week of the new “Realtime Search,” I found a renewed interest in the possibilities of another strong source of SEO. What I discovered left me scratching my head and consequently consumed a larger part of my morning than I had to spare. My SEO and content was being hijacked!

What I found on the “Realtime Search” updates page was a list of threads all from Twitter. Some I recognized, but some were a bit disturbing. We use a lot of video at our dealerships and I have known for a long time that our online video content was being scraped for use on other non-related sites. It never really bothered me because even though the sites using it had their own agenda, they were generally rogue video sites that appeared to be harmless. Besides, the video was there and the headline was the same, so it added to our SERP.

What I discovered after drilling down into the “Realtime Search” results was

Finding Sales People to work 60 Hours a Week?

A Sales Manager asked me the other day, “why am I having such a hard time finding salespeople who want to work 60 hours a week?” For those of us who have lived much of our lives in and around a dealership, 50-60 hours a week may seem like a common work environment. But I started asking myself a serious question like “why should anyone have to work that many hours?”

Many dealerships haven’t changed much over the years. We still pay salespeople strictly on a commission basis, we still feel like by hiring them we own their lives, we still have trouble hiring professional people, and we still expect the ones we do hire to be successful on their own. I know there are a lot of reasons we haven’t changed our philosophy for how we run our sales department, some of them even logical. But you would think after all the years the auto dealership has been around we could have come up with a better way of hiring and handling our employees.

I often remark why it will be difficult to publish a traditional book on SEO for car dealers when the rules pertaining to Google search results continue to change. On Friday August 20th, Google announced another change in how organic search results will be displayed in SERP’s. The 10 organic listings shown on any search is called a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

According to a post on Google’s Webmaster blog, large websites that have strong consumer interest (this could include your dealership website), can now have more than two organic search results. This is a big change because if your dealership website can get four organic listings, you will dominate the top places where consumers click above the fold.

In the example on the Google blog, a museum can have four organic listings at the top of a SERP: