Google: how crucial are time and location to the Search ranking
About a month ago, on the morning of September 10th, millions of people in northern California woke up under an orange sky after the smoke from a fire had spread like a thick layer on the West Coast. For many people, that was the first time they had seen something like this and the situation lasted for a few days.
What does this have to do with Google and Search? Well, a lot of those people have been looking for answers on the search engine to figure out what was going on, leading to a SERP revolution for the query “why is the sky orange“, as Danny Sullivan recounts, starting from this case to explain how time and geographical location can influence and transform the ranking of results on Google.
The queries’ time and location factors
As you can see from the Google Trends chart, also taken from the blog post on The Keyword, the query Why is the sky orange was not completely new to Google and had its own SERP, made of many pages “with general scientific explanations of what can turn the sky orange”.
In the weeks of the Californian event, the research reached its historical peak in the United States, but there was an important difference: “people wanted to know why, at that time and place they were, the sky was dyed