Google Personalized Search – Good or Bad for SEO Professionals

Google Personalized Search – Good or Bad for SEO Professionals

Google has introduced a new system it ranks web pages in the search results, it’s called Google personalized search, it is based on personal user experience his likes or dislikes. This way of ranking has been discussed a lot during the last few weeks, SEO professionals and webmasters are still wondering how to measure SEO success now.

Google Blog says:

“Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide, and in more than forty languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be able to better provide you with the most relevant results possible.” - Google Blog

The main point here is that people know longer need to be logged into Google to see modified results. You will know when a set of results is modified when the ‘View Customizations’ link is inserted in the SERP.

Today everyone gets a different SERP!!

This is very troubling for many SEO professionals, they were doing well with their clients but since this update has appeared, the measurement of success has been predicted.

Interestingly, the top 3-4 results were often very consistent with minor re-rankings. The 5-10 positions were far more likely to have larger re-ranking anomalies.

Types of Personalization

Geo-graphic

• Localized TLD
• IP address
• Query analysis

Technical

• Browser
• OS capabilities
• Cookies?
• Toolbar?

Time based

• Time of day
• Time of year
• Historical data

 Behavioral

• Query history
• SERP interaction
• Selection and bounce rates
• Interactions with advertising
• Surfing habits (frequent surfer – fresher results)

Possible Personalization

Social Search

• Bookmarks (and sharing)
• Reader (and sharing)
• Voting/SERP manipulation/sharing tools

Demographic (including geo-graphic)

• Service account (a profile on a search engine service)
• Toolbar data (auto-fill)
• Search patterns (query types)

Surfing history (implicit data)

• Non search referrer
• Tracked via toolbar/browser
• Interactions with site
• Personalized Page Rank
• Behavioral data
• Categorized segmentation
• Harmonic Rank

Google got good response from users regarding Google personalized search, that it can be very effective in dealing with spam. The more personalized the results, the less chance that spammy domains will be ranking.

What to do to tackle Google Personalized Search

every one is looking to tackle Google Personalized Search, you should follow following guidelines:

• Demographics
• Relevance Profile
• Keyword Targeting/Phrase Strategies.
• Quality Content
• Search Result Conversion
• Freshness
• Print Page/bookmark me/social
• Site Usability
• Analytics

If you have done the good hands on the following fields, you have done enough, lots of testing and checking is still under process, and we will see many wonders in upcoming future just like Google Caffeine.