Google Personalization and In-house SEO

by danperry on December 8, 2009

in In-house SEO

If you don’t know, Google has decided to automatically opt-in everyone into their personalized results, which will appear whether or not they’re logged in. This is a big deal for in-house SEO’s, to be sure. Here’s the story if you missed it.

Three things come to mind…

Ranking reports may become worthless. This is up for debate, but if Google is personalizing EVERYONE’S results, how can you run a ranking report? The results for the same searches week after week may start skewing based on the machine their run from, showing an inflated sense of ranking. You can opt-out, but since everyone is opted-in by default, is this a true sense of the rankings?

SEO may become tougher to sell internally. As different internal employees search for relevant terms, they’re results are going to continue to be skewed towards their own web sites. In effect, their sites will be ranking high, giving them a false sense that the SEO that’s been done is enough. This could prove painful when it comes to trying to get prioritization for SEO-specific projects.

SEO is more important than ever. If a random person continually searches for your generic terms and your competitor continues to appear, over time they will see more and more of your competitor’s pages in their results. If you’re not already ranking, it could become increasingly more difficult to find new people to consume your content.

What else comes to mind?

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