WARNING – We’re going to stray a bit from SEO today and venture a little bit into the philosophical.
However, it goes without saying that Google’s new personalized search strategy is making waves among search engine optimization experts. How will personalization for anyone using Google, not just members logged into their accounts, affect the search results they see?
Answers to this question and many others like what this new feature means for websites who use organic search marketing channels will probably take a bit of time to answer.
Google has maintained user history for quite some time now – installing a “cookie” on a user’s web browser, which logs your searches with the engine. Now, they are taking this data to personalize your search results without your knowledge up front. While the cookies can be disabled on your browser and the personalization setting disabled in Google itself, most users and clients won’t take the time to do it since they probably don’t understand what’s going on in the first place.
One webmaster/SEO discussing the topic on a forum says it’s not an easy task to keep Google search history turned off – once this user turned his Google search history off, it somehow was turned back on without his knowledge.
Which is what leads to so much concern about this change – a user’s privacy and how it is compromised with this sort of policy – a big concern among webmasters and SEOs to say the least, as evidenced by a discussion on Google’s change at WebMasterWorld.
What are the implications on one’s privacy with a move like this? Before, users had to “opt-in” for personalized search results. They could request this personalization if they wanted to. Now, it’s “opt-out”…so now unsuspecting web users are having their prior search history and location dictate the results they see.
Not only does this carry consequences for privacy, it also can limit what someone sees. Now, their access to all available sources will be limited to what Google thinks they want to see, not what they need to see necessarily…a new precedent indeed.