Google has been collecting and storing users personal search histories going back for the previous 180 days; until December 2009 only signed in Google users had this feature enabled, but now we all do (unless we disable it).
Google says: this delivers search results tailored to your own tastes which are determined from what you have been searching for, and sites you have been visiting, in the last 6 months. If you are into dinosaurs, then when you search for “raptor” you are less likely to get search results based on the USAF fighter plane and more on the Jurassic Park theme. If you search for wines a lot, then typing in Bordeaux will get you more results aimed at the drink and not the French town.
Is this really a good step forward for Google?
They seem to think it will make them more money, by allowing for more specifically targeted and contextual ads to be displayed alongside search results (which means more expensive).
From a user perspective, perhaps it will not be so helpful – if a user searches for a term, then Google will look at the search history and see what sites have been visited in the past 180 days – the more times a site has been visited before, the more likely it will be returned in the current search results. In other words, the current search is going to keep rehashing the same clique of websites they already use and that is boring. If I want to use Wikipedia, I don’t use Google to find it – I simply type the url in directly but then again, Google has not launched this onto the mainstream world without a lot of market research.
The impact for web site owners is this: depending on the computer being used, which will have a search history specifically tailored to the users past searches and preferences, a completely different set of search results will be returned instead of the uniform search results of the past.
But doesn’t that mean my top ranking web site will no longer be #1 on all the millions of different computers out there?
Don’t panic – the answer is “No!” - but implementing great SEO strategies is now more important than ever!
When searches were uniform, i.e. user A and user B search for “Moonshot”, they both got the same search results. Personalized search means the current results are skewed based on previous searches and site visits unique to them. Except for some time, Google has been taking into account the geographical location of users to return more finely tuned results – try using Google.com for a search and then use Google.com, for instance. Search results have differed between a West coast user and East coast user, as well as between major cities and regions for quite some time now.
So searches have not been as “uniform” as you might think for quite a while, and Local Search has been increasingly important. Not least because Local Search has handed a huge opportunity to small and medium sized companies as well as increasing the importance of using good SEO strategies – see our previous post on Local Search for more information on this.
Another point: personalized search has only recently been launched in the mainstream, so the impact of the feature is increasingly relevant to, but not dominating, the search results right now. This creates an immediate window of opportunity for sites which can gain greater visibility with users right now. This will in turn feed into higher rankings, because personalized search reinforces the use of a website already in the user’s search history. Now is the time to be maximizing traffic to your web site to get an added boost in rankings when the 180 day period has been utilized in creating the full search histories of users (by June this year).
Personalized Search is Taking SEO to a New Level of Importance
So if different users are getting different search results why should anyone bother with SEO?
The answer is simple, users will not be getting such widely different search results if SEO strategies are employed which continue to demonstrate the value, authority and relevance for users on the keywords they are searching for.
Link building is more important; keyword and key phrase research and identification are more important; increasingly effective organic traffic generation using social media, promotional and cross-marketing tactics is more important.
It is more crucial than ever that your content is “FANTASTIC” – great copy, great images and graphics, great video – content which will keep a user interested and coming back again and again. The more times your site attracts return visitors, the higher the rankings your site will enjoy – now even more so, all thanks to personalized search.
Far from killing off SEO, personalized search has handed web-based businesses with yet another huge business opportunity for those who grasp the compelling need for SEO excellence.
Personalized Search has made SEO indispensable!
