This feature is probably unknown by most of you but could become very useful for increasing your users/client Google search experience and relevancy. It is called a Subscribed Link, and it allows you to “create a custom search results that your users, clients or members can add to their Google search pages. Wow!
What is Google Subscribe link? - Google subscribe links allows you (as a google user) to customize your search experience and return relevant results which are customized (and pre-set) by you. It also allows you to let your ‘readers’ or ‘users’ or ‘members’ or even ‘clients’ to subscribe to your ‘links’ and have them appear in their search results when searching Google.
For example:
1) A Company could display new products or even offer special discounted product to ‘Google links Subscribers’ (hint!)
2) An airline company could display their latest flight information to their subscribers.
3) A news source could return the latest news postings.
4) Answer common question like: What is the time and date, what is the weather, what is my IP address …
5) Return Google Gadgets within your search results like time, date, stock information….
And some nice advanced features:
- Build a dynamic version using XML, TSV, or RSS files or feeds.
- Include images in your Subscribed Links.
- Test your Subscribed Links interactively and get debugging messages.
- Define query patterns using lists of keywords or regular expressions.
…. the possibilities are endless!
Here is a very simple example: I would like my blog to always appear in the number 1 position in Google and I would like my trusted reader to always see me first when they search my name ‘Chris Baldwin’. To do this, I signup with Google subscribe and create a link to make this happen. When I now search for ‘Chris Baldwin’ I see my custom created link as the first listing. Anyone who subscribes to my links by clicking the button above that says “Add my expertise to your Google web searches” will now seem my custom listing when they search my name. Cool hey!
Here is a screenshot of what the listing would look like:
Imagine what a company could do with this! As I stated in example 1 above, a company could provide a link subscription service to all their opt-in clients and these clients would get products at a discount when using Google. The advantage here is that the company can now always appear on Google first page for the search term they chose to appear for free of charge!! :)
Do let me know if you have used this Google feature successfully already! I am in the testing phases as it was launched recently from Beta. It looks like a nice Search engine marketing tool!
