In the Future, Google will personalize (nearly) all SERPs

Johannes Beus
Yesterday, Google announced that they will not only return personalized SERPs for logged-in Google-users but that they are going to let everyone get a piece of this dubious feature. With the personalized results, websites or URLs that are frequently visited by the user will get a better ranking (=will show up higher in the SERPs) than in the normal results. Hanns has already written an extensive account of how to get around this.

This change in how URLs are ranked is quite interesting from a SEO-point-of-view. Some (update: a little more detailed) are already predicting the fall of the Western world, but I am more relaxed concerning that matter. For a while now, everyone in the SEO-field will agree that (while not officially confirmed) the user's behavior is flowing into the SERPs. While, in the future, the SERPs will look slightly different for different users, the impact on the “standard-SERPs” will be very minor: all those decisions that are made by a majority of users are already part of the SERPs, which means that it could be said, that the SERPs are already in an equilibrium right now – a single users preferences will not have a noticeable effect on the SERPs traffic in its entirety.
Johannes Beus - on Sat (12/05/2009) at 09:27 AM

Add Comment

more
This posting is older than 30 days and therefore closed for new comments.