I just noticed how different results are in google personalized search and the normal results. Apparently this is based on user actions rather than usefulness. And I actually saw a result with a wikipedia page on top in the normal search but when I switched to personal it went down! So what do you think is this going to null SEO? As the whole point of SEO is to control SERPs. Thank You
I would have the opposite feeling that it helps website owners. Any prequalification of visitors only improves your conversion rates.
For starters, personalised search isn't prevalent yet, so we're talking about the future here. Even with personalised search, there will still be a need for SEO to ensure that clients websites are in those top spots, competing for visibility to the user. Personalised SERPS still need to base their rankings on something, and in fact I'm looking forward to the challenge - I can see a case where a really hard SEO term such as 'loans' becomes easier to rank for for your target market, due to locally personalised search results, or other factors. The biggest change I think will be in the fact that you can't report on rankings - because of course each person may have slightly different SERPS, What you see as #1 in Google may not be for your client/customer. This will force the SEO industry into reporting and justifying their work based on ROI and not on search rankings. That can only be a good thing for the client, surely?
] THat is actually an excellent point I didn't think about. If personalized search were the dominant way people used Google (I don't actually believe that will be the case in the near future though or even at all seeing as the typical Google search user will always just put in the url and do a quick search) then SEO as an industry would have to adapt. Of course the majority of lower level SEOs I have dealt with tend to quote based on time spent rather then rankings which wouldn't change. That may just be my influence as I always prefer to pay for work done over promises to hit a certain spot which can easily be explained away when they don't hit it by "fluxuating datacenters" or a million other reasons.
Absolutely - I've yet to come across a reputable agency who charge based on rankings. The problem is that although the agency I work for charge hourly, and pride ourselves on our ROI focused campaigns, many clients have been led to believe that rankings are the be all and end all, and are more interested in you getting them #1 for some generic keyterm than increasing their ROI by 100%+ I also don't believe we'll see personalised search any time soon, but I also believe that SEO and search engines are still a long way off being a mature market, so there's a lot of possible change in the future. I love being in such an interesting industry
As I am sure you will agree, a big part of an good SEO's job is educating people who have been convinced by all the myths or have been subject to a Traffic Power sales call back in the day (Hmmm, hundreds of doorway pages is the future of SEO lol)
Yes, and certainly most clients are willing to be educated. Sometimes it's a struggle just to get them to let you do what they're paying you for. I remember the urgent phone call I had to make to a client recently, after they had excitedly emailed me to tell me they'd just purchased a program called 'Blog Blaster'
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/007384.html You guys still sure it won't effect the rankings of sites based on what the human behavior is? Check out that SE roundtable post with an example. Thank You