Personalised Search Now a Permanent Feature in Google

Has the future of SEO been irrevocably altered to the detriment of its potential use in Google? This kind of question has been slowly infiltrating search forums this week following Google’s personalised search announcement on Friday (04/12/09).

Google have operated personalised search results for its members for a while but have now decided to expand the service to encompass all users, whether they have a Google account or not. In the field of SEO, this has initially sounded alarm bells because, in personalised search, regular visits to a person’s preferred sites could rank these higher than those that have been dutifully optimised. Then of course there is the issue of privacy.

Are Google Playing Big Brother?

In order for Google to be able to roll out personalised search to all users they have introduced a cookie to track non-Google account holders’ search habits for 180 days. In web history, they will track the most popular sites that a user clicks on and these could then feature more prominently in similar future searches.

However, as Google themselves point out in a blog post they “let you turn off this type of customisation.” They also insist that the cookie deletes any history after 180 days. For some, turning this option off may be more about diversity of results than privacy issues.

Lack of Diversity in Search Results over Time

For many bloggers and SEO experts a lack of diversity in search results could be the biggest change that affects SEO. It is true that having results that are more pertinent to your search habits and interests will reduce the amount of time filtering through un-related pages of content. This new feature has the potential to favour the strongest brands as their pages will attract more clicks which in turn will lead to higher positions. Is a more limited set of search results what people really want?

Dom Barry of home james said: “We are closely monitoring the effects of these changes.  If Google starts to serve more of your site pages to people who are already clicking on your links then having great quality, well optimised content is still king, which is not exactly a new development. SEO is still essential for business sites and metrics like referral tracking, goal tracking and bounce rate are now even more vital to track and use to improve the performance of your site.”

Greater Emphasis on Content

Essentially, the focus on content will become even more important to the success of a site. Users operating personalised search are likely to return to a source they value and trust and herein lies the value of content.

Rich, quality content has long-been a valuable commodity for SEO, inspiring in-bound links to a site which would improve ranking as well as the obvious aesthetic and intellectual appeal. This will only continue under Google’s new guise, if not more significantly. If the content is good enough for people to keep returning and perhaps recommend to friends, it will maintain a higher page rank, effectively bookmarking it in your search results.

To suggest that this latest innovation of Google’s could be the death of SEO is a little far-fetched. Yes, there are incremental concerns about privacy that are likely to leave many people sitting uncomfortably in their chairs and it will create a new playing field for SEO but that will only require better analysis of your target market.