Updated: December 30, 2009
Late one recent Friday afternoon, Google made a big announcement that went largely unnoticed in the search engine world but could possibly have dramatic consequences for searchers and search engine optimization pros.
The change revolves around Google’s implementation of personalized search results for everyone – not only for Google members signed into their accounts.
Company engineers and officials claim the switch is designed to provide better and more relevant search results to their users. Google will now customize search results based on your search activity over the last 80 days. Users will know when Google has customized their results when they see a “view customizations” link in the top right of the search results – they can click on that link to see how Google has personalized their search results.
Users can opt out of this feature by making a couple of simple clicks as outlined in the video below.
Why is this a big change? Well up until now, Google and other search engines have by and large returned the same results to anyone using the same keyword phrase to search for something. Now, it will be much easier to return results Google thinks is more focused on what the searcher is looking for.
How does this affect SEO and does this mean that optimizing websites for search engines is dead?
Well, personalized search isn’t new and on some level, especially in geographic terms, it has been around for awhile. Searchers in Europe will likely see different results than searchers using the same term in the U.S.
Nevertheless, debate is fierce about how this is going to affect SEO and whether it’s a good change or not. Some think personalized search results are great for users while others think it will only return things people want to see and limit their access to all available sources. Others even think this isn’t big news at all and SEOs and webmasters are making much ado about nothing.
You can safely assume though that SEO is still needed just so you can have a shot at top search engine rankings – not having any optimization at all will definitely relegate your rankings to page 2 or lower.
We’ll keep you posted on anything we learn into the New Year about new personalized search features from Google and if there are any strategies you need to implement on your site to maintain high rankings.