Have you paid any attention to personalized search yet? If you stay logged into one of your Google accounts such as Gmail, your search history will start to accumulate. As your history grows Google starts to modify the SERPs that they send you in ways that they think will be more pleasing.
I first noticed this a few days ago when Google seemed to know which site belonged to me in the SERPs. When I searched for my main keyword I could see [homepage] in the SERPs right below my URL. When I clicked on the homepage it took me to a page that displayed my search history... whoa! It was a little bit if a surprise. Also, if I query for "personalized search" and click the number 1 result (with a title tag of "Google Search History") it also takes me to a page that displays my search history.
This search history page has a long list of my search terms, separated into queries where I have clicked a result and queries that I did not click a result. In addition it has a small calendar that I can click and see what I have searched on any day back to January 22nd.
Before I understood what was going on I watched my sites climb higher and higher in the SERPs. I thought that I was getting kickass rankings! But it was simply the personalization and Google figuring out what kind of sites that I like. It was like the woman who authored a book and visited the page where it was sold on Amazon... pretty soon she was telling everyone that her book was featured on the Amazon homepage - but they could not see it... lol
This is just a warning that you should not order that new Porche if you see your site climbing the SERPs. It could be personalized search playing a trick on you.
Once you have accumulated a search history you can check how much it influences your SERPs by doing a search while logged into your Google account, logging out and then doing the same search. Bam! Immediately different. Now you see what every Joe Schmoe gets who does not log in to a Google account.
I've heard lots of people complaining about the personalized search being bad for SEOs. My two cents on this is that it is a good thing. Why? Because it adds some diversity to the SERPs and gives your sites a chance to rank higher when Mrs. A searchs than it otherwise would rank. This should build a little diversity into your rankings portfolio. Diversity in your income stream is not a bad thing. And, if you are doing something really right, then your site might rank number 1 for everybody - no matter if their results are personalized or not.
I know that this new feature will bring out a diversity of opinions. I'd really enjoy hearing what you think. If you have not experimented with it, you might want to check it out - it's might have an impact on your bottom line.
By: EGOL
Two Cents on Personalized Search
Search Engines
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
True Story:
I get a call one day from a client saying that they are now ranking #1 for their main keyword, even though we had just started their program, and they were in the #3 spot the day before.
Come to find out it was the personalized results playing a trick on them.
Good stuff.
lol... that is really funny, Jarrod. I'll bet lots of clients are going around thinking that their SEO is a God! I've seen some forum posts lately ... "GOT #1 RANKINGS BUT NO TRAFFIC" ... those might be personalized search too!
Yeah that brings in another aspect. Crooked 'seo' who have 'proof' that their client is ranking for the keywords they agreed to. In most cases a good threat from an seo about taking legal action will get them to pay their dues even if the seo has done nothing. So that is one side of it.
I am not sure I like the feature totally. First of all for newbies(and some of us who aren't so new to the internet. I didn't notice it for a while :P) it isn't so plain. I am sure alot of people do not realize they are using personalized search and perhaps are dissatisifed with the results not knowing those aren't the real results. Google should make this a little plainer. Yes I know it is in the upper right hand corner but if my observations are correct isn't that a dead area? I mean I think that area is one of the least viewed on a page. Maybe I made that up (lol) but I think that is correct...
If I see the personalized search on I will log-out to turn it off. I dont use personalized search because I use Google to find relevant results and I dont want those results changed to match my browsing. Because it can be turned off by logging out I dont have an issue with it but again dont use it that much.
That is just my thoughts on it.
BTW again EGOl good post and good points. Is there anyway I can hire you? :P
LOL - that's great! If it were me I'd have to think twice about telling them what was really happening or not. Sure I would tell them, but it's always fun to play with other options.
Personalized search is the future. So many people are posting bad things about it, but none of that will matter. It will continue to improve and improve until the results of personalized searches are substantially more relevant then searching without them on.
You are absolutely correct. Most users of search services are not worried about privacy issues, creativity issues, etc. They want exacting results with as few hassles as possible. "Joe the student", "Brad the business manager", and "Suzy the housewife" want answers from their search queries. Personalized search, in the longer term, will likely afford them that.
In a way your right. I believe that. I agree that someday in the future it will probably be much better. One reason I don't like it turned on is it does effect my position so that I think I am someplace I am not :P
Again as I believe Seo-am pointed out. We are looking at this from a seo bias. For the internet search world I think it is a great tool. I am not saying it is bad as it is a very good idea I just don't tend to use it. That has alot to do with me being an seo. If I was a normal searcher I probably would use it more often.
Agreed.
EGOL, you make a good point about personalized search, in that it spreads traffic around to different websites instead of the more "winner-take-all" aspect in which the #1 search result gets perhaps much more traffic than the other sites.
Although I agree with you Matt that the intent might be good, but I don't like personalization to be automatically turned on without notifying the user. I had to turn personalization off. I think it should be an opt-in instead of opt-out.
oh and hello Matt =) Hoping to meet you in person at SES London next week.
Thanks Matt. I don't understand exactly how personalized search works but if you have a good site my bet is that it will perform better when people have a chance to influence their own SERPs. I look forward to that opportunity.
but many people are blessed with the effect of personalized search results to keep good screen shots connected with search results always at the prime position, it is useful for case studies and report preparation he he
I guess with personalized search it'll be easy for us to convince our clients what a great job we're doing. See I got your home page ranked #1 in only two days.
I have a few reservations about personalized search, mostly in that I think it's going to stagnate thought. One of the reasons I search is to find new things and if the results are going to be based on sites I've looked at in the past I'll be consistently seeing the same pages over and over again.
I doubt I'll be searching while logged into anything Google for this reason, but the majority of people probably will be and I wonder how many are going to start seeing a smaller and smaller version of the web.
I've also wondered how new sites will fare. With no click history will new sites be visible in search results? If I've shown a very strong interest in 10 sites on a particluar topic how often will I see a new site that I may like more in the results? Will new sites be given an early boost to allow them to gather a click history?
Humor is good if it makes one feel "safe" but the fact is data mining personal travels on the internet is just the beginning. Yeah I think Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox and the rest are smart people but often when you are focused "on task" you fail to see the entire picture.
For some reason the phrase "All will be assimilated" comes to mind but maybe my comparison is a little early and surely can be shrugged off as that of a tinfoil wearing hat.
As Danny Sullivan pointed out, the "opt in" area for new members is easy to miss and most/all people wouldn't even bother thinking or have the capacity to think about what exactly a "history" is.
Very good post EGOL.
You make some great points Aaron,
but...I think Humor is the sugar coating that is often needed when trying to discuss hard-to-swallow truths.
The right to privacy is one of the heaviest debates going, and like you said most people are either too busy, or don't care enough to get involved.
If it takes humor to get people to listen, then I fully embrace it!
BTW... "The Daily Show" Rocks!
It would appear that most are responding to personalized search from the perspective of a SEO bias. If you look at it from a longer term perspective of the user community, personalized search is pretty exciting. To build a profile of a searcher under which site preferences, subject preferences, search methodology (click paths) are initially created and added to through time could provide invaluable insight into what to serve up to user.
The above said... I turned off personalized search. I guess, as mentiioned above, I like surprises and wading through what is presented... part of my SEO side I guess.
I'm with you, SEO_AM. I like surprises.
If there is a source that I like, I can bookmark it so that I can find it easily.
I agree with Solomon. Personal search is the future whether we like it or not. Of course SEOs will debate how beneficial it is, but we are, or course, being selfish. We want as much control as we can get, especially when the search engines are keeping so much a secret. Well, now we can't even predict what on user may see over another.
I truly believe in SEO and if your strategies are in alignment with converting more browsers to customers then personal search won't matter because:
I long for the day when ranking reports are a mere curiosity to my clients because their sales are so high. We are seeing this with all long-term clients for the most part since we have increased their sales. Only the new ones are concerned with ranking for certain terms.
On the other hand, high-maintenace clients that check their rankings every hour of the day may see better results since they visit their own sites so frequently and maybe they will now quit calling us every other hour of the day. ;-)
Sir
I also got many appreciations from many clients and associate authorities. When clients and website owners conduct meeting to know SERP improvements of their projects, the personalized search results were real blessing. It is true that most of the clients from India asks about improvements just before they credit the monthly payments even they got more queries than previous months. When the google buzz was live the star coming in search results in personalized search results for book marked items were easy to identity.
Hope Google identifies what the user likes more and include them when they index a result for personalized search. It may be pages we visited before or may be close connected with us
thanks for your reply, I need to do more research on it
Personal (and Local) Search were always coming, and always going to shake up the SERPs - Danny Sullivan has done some great presentations on this.
I figure a lot of companies are going to be totally fooled by their personalised results - going to be a common email question this. However, I think it could actually be good for SEO's in lower initial expectations, and results readily viewable via analytics to prove it's working.
I think my main objection is as a user - Google used to be great for finding those little sites and pages you'd never normally come across, and I'm not convinced they can deliver on that. Secondly, this is going to be a nightmare on shared computers.
Reminds me of when I was Christmas shopping on Amazon for my girlfriend - couldn't load the site up with her in the room without Amazon cheerfully declaring on the homepage what my recent searches where. Maybe if I have to use Google for presents this year, I'm going to have to avoid using Google when she's out of the room. :)
<blockquote>VanGogh said: I have a few reservations about personalized search, mostly in that I think it's going to stagnate thought. One of the reasons I search is to find new things and if the results are going to be based on sites I've looked at in the past I'll be consistently seeing the same pages over and over again.</blockquote>
interesting point. i wish matt had answered that one. i certainly don't want a smaller web.
i am not normally paranoid of google and have been trying to remember to not be logged in when searching, but will be sure to from now on in the future!
there must be a limit to the # of times you can edit your own comments. i couldn't get the quote right and after about 3 edits, my edit comment link was gone.
weird.
great post EGOL!
Some very good points being raised here, in my opinion the beauty of the web is that you don't know what you are going to find, discovering new sites are part of the fun.
Van Gogh you made a great point about stagnating results; will the web become smaller and smaller with personalised search?? I certainly don't want to get the same site showing up over and over again just because I looked through the site once or twice. And Matt I totally understand the thought behind it (very Amazon) but I agree that this should be an opt in feature not a opt out.
old, but good article!
GOOD , SEO is a fun game right now! Ouch! :)
Seems like SEO is a fun game right now! Ouch! :)
Great job!
good, SEO is fun like a game. we must focus.
Nice post and good suggestion by EGOl.
Seems like SEO is a fun game right now! Ouch! :)
Very well said
One reason I don't like it turned on is it does effect my position so that I think I am someplace I am not
Great post!!
Great article, so are we supposed to do our SEO tests using a computer bearing no Gmail/Google login cookies?
This article also reminds me of my "Why Gmail/Google is the devil" article I wrote back when Google first released Gmail. It is about how the value of each google/gmail/services user will be so high eventually because Google would have the power to do a more exact profiling of each of their users - from mail content to search keywords.
My concern with personalized search is not really related to SEO. Since the Internet is a home for ideas, I fear that personalized search will enable people to bolster their biases and allow them to remain ignorant to a wealth of new ideas out there.
Granted, as much as the search engines are doing to combat black hat tactics, the best ideas and sources of information are not necessarily ranked the highest. However, it seems more open than a personalized search that caters and panders to one's limited knowledge and prejudices.
Future generations will regret having given privacy away to friendly Google who was taken over by a government agency in 2020, all in the name of national security.
;0)
The privacy concerns with keeping a personal trail of what you were searching for is one of the points I was hinting at with my comment above. If you delete them, but Google still captures some form of the data, at what point is it unique enough data to be considered personal or grouped enough to be aggregate. I doubt the big G will cave into most government inquiries for popular trends, but with a neurotic state of mind the nation is living in (google: Boston Mooninites) we can almost be certain that the frequency of inquiries from government agencies will increase. And that's just here in the U.S., let's not forget that the G has a big foothold in other countries too, and the laws for protecting citizens' privacy vary widely.
Now for a little humor, check out this google user who offered a screenshot of his recent search history here. (That's one of my favorite comics of all time, btw).
Roadies, that's hilarious =)
OMG, that comic was great!
I think its a good thing for navigational search, bad for informational search cause youre mixing the two up with each other.
personalised search is indeed better as a opt in because in the end personalized search equals advertising.
This is just a warning that you should not order that new Porche if you see your site climbing the SERPs. It could be personalized search playing a trick on you.
Man, Egol, you're always doing the spoiling! ;)
But you are right: personalized search is a good thing. It is in Google's best interest to present the best experience possible to the user. So if one Google user prefers CBS Sports page for the Superbowl, while everone else uses the official superbowl site, it behooves Google to make the ranking for CBS Sports higher for that single user. Multiply this experience for millions of users by millions of individual queries and you build a reputation for an better overall experience. People will continue to use Google when they consciously notice this (such as you did in your example) instead of migrating to a lesser experience such as Yahoo or MSN.
Now, the real question is: Do the results stick if you delete your history? If so, does that mean they truly didn't delete your history at your request or is it just caching of the results? This could be a whole conversation in and of itself.
The one caveat with personalized search is that there is no way to distinguish which are results personalized and served to you from the original SERPs being created by the main algorithm. Loggin in and Logging out can be a chore.
The "history" is in Google's database, not the "history" in your browser.
I have solved the log-in - log-out problem by using my Google account with Firefox and using the SERPs with IE.
The "history" is in Google's database, not the "history" in your browser.
Yeah, I know that. But you can delete your user history from Google's database (or so they make us believe, which is my point). Just click on "search history" in the upper right hand nav on any SERPS page. You can also cusomize the service to only log history from certain Google services. So, I could tell it to log my history for my basic web search requests, but not to cache any data for my searches on images.
Danny Sullivan did a good review of personalized search a few days ago.
https://searchengineland.com/070202-224617.php
Here's a quote about your search history
"Be aware that while deleting wipes out material from your search history (and keeps it from being used in personalized search), Google says the records are still kept in some form."
It would be nice for Google to offer an option to use the personalized search or not instead of forcing a logout or use of another browser. I have a hard time seeing why they couldn't offer that option. I'd also prefer if you have to opt in to both search history and personalized search instead of them being active by default.
I think the majority are going to like personalized search. I have no doubt Google will continue to improve on the system and will end up serving results more releavnt to the individual.
I still have my reservations as I stated above, but as with most things I'm willing to see how the system develops. It is pretty new and I'm sure it'll be a different system six months from now than it is today.
Thanks for the URL to Danny's extensive post on personalized search. Anybody interested in this should read his article. Lots of screenshots and how it works!
Not only would it be nice if one could opt-in and out, but it would also be nice, especiallly for seo's and marketeers, to be able to use different profiles.
For example, if you're a seo working on a campaign for an insurance agency, you should be able to use personalized results for an 'insurance agent', and so on. This helps you to gain insight in how the personalized results would work, in comparison to 'normal' results.
These different profiles could be pre-programmed, built by a user-community (through tagging,rating, or something like that) or just yourself and ofcourse any combination of these three.
That is all and thank you !!!
Seems like the discipline of writing catchy titles and descriptions just became much more important.
That's my take-away from this. "Free Beer" in the title tag!
I still find this really annoying. How do you switch off the personalised search results anyone ?
I thinks signing out from google am I correct?
Same thing happened to me. Here I was working on a new keyword, BAM! #1 the next day. Boss says, what do you mean, we're barely top 10! Signed out and reality stepped in :(
Ok. From reading these comments, it seems like it could be a good thing for everyone. Correct me if im wrong but but the SE's mysteriously personalizing the serps traffic will then be that much more targeted which then equals better conversions.
So I guess SEOer's will now only compete within that personalize area of interest. Wouldnt that be alot more beneficial?
While there may be some postive features to this, it is a little worrisome. I think one of the biggest points that people have brought out is that the average user may be completely clueless to this.
At some point does searching become a self-fulfilling prophecy where results actually become narrower and narrower unnaturally simply based on your previous choices, no matter how good or bad they were to begin with and people assume that the results must be the best because they continue to dominate top spots?
Will there be a huge focus on viral-buzz-SEO where you blitz the market with a search phrase that you can immediately own or your website name, knowing that many average users are just as likely to search for a URL as they are actually type it into the address bar (I'm pretty sure some people think the only way to get to a website is by searching for it and then clicking on the link in the SERPs), with the idea of driving tons of traffic through search in order to boost this history position?
And will sites be able to retain position unnaturally, even when better sites come along?
When will personalization become pre-meditated based on demographics? While people are concerned about privacy, more of us are probably giving away more bits and pieces than we really care to or would if we really stopped to think about it. Often it may be seen as disconnected bits here and there, but who better to put all those pieces together than search engines? So when will results be served up not just on keywords but because other people with a similar demographic footprint and search history selected these results?
Most of us are already overwhelmed with choices. Will the vast majority of people, if only secretly, be thankful to have choices reduced rather than increased? Will SERPs start listing only the top 3 or 5 results, requiring users to specifically request the other results?
One thing is at least certain, you need to make a conscious awareness now to how you are searching, whether the results being returned are personalized or not... but how soon in the busy day to day will that be forgotten even for those of us who are aware?
very good information !
i think i late to know this info, but nice post