 |
Join Our Landing Page Optimization Course And Get Your Free A/B Split Testing Tool When You Enroll!
Click Here |
| Recent Articles |
Q&A: Ensuring The Same Pages On 2 Domains Are...
Dear Kalena... I am starting out with two domains of the same name so I get international and local visitors sent by search engines. Quite often people look for local...
Q&A - Promoting Domain Names
Dear Kalena... I have a favor to ask you. I hope to launch the revised version of my site shortly and I'm re-considering the URL to submit to the Search Engines. Would my site be better served under the name...
Starting Promotion From Scratch
When I was new to the web I was excited when I would get things to rank from scratch, thinking I did a great job of SEO, but if your results are effective and consider applicable risks does it matter what techniques you...
Penalties Vs Filters & Optimization Vs Over...
Jill Whalen recently posted to SEL about how duplicate content penalties are not penalties, but filters. If you duplicate on a small scale duplicate content does not...
Social Media Icons: How Many Is Too Many?
As some of you know I'm working on a redesign of my site. Part of the reason for the new design is optimizing the site more for social media, including the use of...
Links Vs. Content
There's a long standing debate in the search marketing industry about links versus content. Which is better? On the one hand there's the perspective that if you create great content, people will link to you naturally.
Social Media: Is It Viral, Or Just A Virus?
Much praise and adoration has been lauded on the alleged marketing and inbound link potential that social media sites, Digg in particular, present to...
Getting The Best Out Of Article Syndication
We all hear how important articles are - especially when used as a tool to help boost search engine rankings. We often read many articles a day about our industry or about something we are trying to learn. However, when...
|
|
|
|
05.03.07
Personalization And The Death Of SEO
 By Dave Davies
...as we know it. On February 2, 2007 Google launched its big push into personalized search results. This was, to many, a dark day as SEO’s scrambled to determine exactly what this meant for the industry and for our clients. Different results showing up for different people? What are ranking reports if what you see differs from what I see? Who’s right? And of course, how do I prove it?
I’ll admit it; my first thoughts at the launch of personalization were not necessarily along the most positive tangents. Upon further reflection (and much of it) and after wading through seven patents to get a better feel for the variables and what they mean (and might mean down the road) I came to one conclusion, coincidentally the same conclusion I consistently come to after each major algorithm update or search technology advancement: Anything that improves the search experience improves the SEO industry. This may seem an obvious statement but when the search engines (especially Google) throw a curve ball at us, one cannot help but worry.
This article will focus on two areas, what is personalization and how will the SEO industry evolve to accommodate this new feature? The answer to the later is quite clear once one understands how personalized results are created.
What Is Personalization?
The most basic explanation of personalization is that it is a system by which the search engines are able to extract patterns from previous search behavior and adjust present and future search results based on “learned” preferences. The simplest example can be found in the repeated selection of a single site when it appears in the search results. Ego drives many (present company included) to click on their own site when it shows up in the search results. Once the site is selected multiple times it will rise in the results when the same or a similar search is run again by the same user. Google has thus learned that you like this site and is now making it easier to get to it again.
Join Our Landing Page Optimization Course And Get Your Free A/B Split Testing Tool When You Enroll!
Click Here |
|
What we can see from the patents that are out there indicate that personalization is going to go MUCH further than this and get far more sophisticated. Like any new technology, it is now in its first stages and as more data can be collected and more time put into tweaking the way personalized results are created and displayed the more factors they will be looking at. The numbers of potential factors, as with any algorithm, are virtually endless in theory however there are some key factors that come up repeatedly in the patents that are sure to hold weight as personalization evolves. They are:
Your personal search history. What you look for and the sites/ads that you select will affect the results you receive when you search. Right now this seems to primarily be restricted to increasing the position of a site that is selected multiple times when it appears in a set of search engine result however as this technology evolves your past behaviors and the types of sites you select in the results will surely be applied to new searches, increasing the positions of sites that have similar characteristics to ones you have selected in the past for completely different queries.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. One of the few SEO firms to offer guaranteed optimization services. Visit their site for a free SEO & web design review and their blog to keep updated on the latest going on in the search engine world.
|
