Google would love to see SEO dead so everyone fights over PPC stuff. But like has been said before in the end of the day there is SOME reason why certain sites are top of the rankings! Not matter what that is people will find out and adapt their sites to take advantage of it! I just hope Google dont implement the voting they are playing with ... or the internet will be full of servers auto-voting for sites all day long
Google has been pretty clear that "social proof" is going to be more and more of a factor. So as far as SEO goes as long as you work to get links from places that can "vote" for you in terms of popularity you'll be okay. So social bookmarking services and anywhere where someone can basically give your content a thumbs up will continue to play a major role in rankings. If you're ignoring this part of the equation you could be in trouble, but if you're working some of it into your SEO process I think you'll be fine. And this is also where posting on forums or commenting on popular blogs and getting involved with discussions will be helpful. You need to build a presence outside of simple organic rankings in Google because those rankings are always vulnerable. Dan
Or i will hire eastern europeans using proxies to vote for my site or create a script that will do it for me! It would turn into a competition on who could spam their links the most.
Isn't this web 3.0 - where the computer understands what you are looking for? So if a maths application searches for 'vector' it get stuff about angles, but if a biological application searches for the same term it gets info on mosquitoes etc. This is a long way off yet.
From what I get from the articles on SEO personalization it's not going to be any major change for most of us. Like Clay said, Java means different things to different people, but if I am a website selling Coffee (Java), people who are searching for coffee still get me, without all the extraneous java (programming language) crap to have to filter through. And some things are not going to change - My site deals with mortgage information - primarily US mortgages, so if Google does more geotargeting, it's only going to benefit me, because all the guys who don't have mortgages or mortgage info for the US will be excluded, leaving less crap for the searcher to have to wade through. I can think of some other ways that I can use this to my advantage too...