In December of last year, Google added a subtle change to the results you get when you look for something on its search engine. Basically, the results you’re getting are now factoring in your search history over the past several months, in addition to the standard results from the search engine’s algorithm. Google’s “personalized” search results are intended to help consumers by matching them up with more relevant product and service listings.
For any site owner who wants to get visitor traffic from Google, the downside if fairly obvious. For one thing, personalized search means that everyone is getting different results, so a #1 keyword ranking for you could be a #6 result for your neighbor. Because individualized search results are based on your IP address, there can be an added level of confusion for the customer. IP addresses are supposed to be a good indicator of a person’s location, but they can be off by up to 100 miles. The history of searches at your particular IP address also skews results, so if you have a website, and are always looking for your own company in the search engines, you may be seeing an artificially high ranking for your own site.
For people who want to see their actual search engine position, outside of the personalized result, there are a few solutions. One of the fastest is to add this snippet to the search results URL:
&pws;=0
After adding this snippet, press “enter” and you will see a closer representation of Google results. You can also get online tools that do this automatically. Google also tells you how to remove your history from your Google Account, but this does not necessarily mean that your IP personalization has been removed.
Part of the problem with personalized search results is also that your computer may be used by a wide variety of people, and individualized results can be based on searches that are only marginally relevant to what you’re looking for right now. Theoretically, individualized search could be building a demographic based on queries, so your results would then contain additions built around several months of searches. This might be fine if you’re the only one who uses the computer, but what if you log on from a Coffee Shop?
Personalized search also hits the world of Search Engine Optimization. Whether you’re hiring an agency or doing your own SEO, you want to get consistent results based on searches. In the past, a top spot on a search engine could be kept for months, or even years. Now, there is a great deal of volatility. Nonetheless, the same SEO principles apply, since it is necessary to have good content, good code, and good links to even become competitive on the first page for most searches. In some cases, personalized search is going to give an advantage to websites that have been visited by the user in the past. In other cases, the best site may be obscured by results that Google “thinks” are a better match.
In the final analysis, personalized search does not diminish the need for optimizing a website correctly. In fact, personalization plus good SEO means that many sites may suddenly get better results. Ideally, Google’s personalization of search will give consumers better information. For website owners who are seeking traffic, being more relevant for more keywords is going to have a greater level of importance, since it is now necessary to get higher average places in a sea of ever-changing results.
Tags: depersonalize
