Personalization Won’t Be The End Of SEO

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Despite her failed attempts at humor and a reporting style that exhibits all the choppiness of a huge lake on a windy day, Lisa Barone wrote a pretty decent piece on personalization in today’s SiteProNews. I’ve got just a few comments on it.

In case you’re wondering why only Google and Yahoo are represented at today’s session, Danny says that Microsoft and Ask declined his offer because they didn’t have much to say about personalized search. Insert your own joke here.

Lisa Barone should start a search engine for personalized bad jokes. Still, this is telling about the four major search engines. Only Google and Yahoo are concerned about personalization. Microsoft and Ask will get left in the dust if they don’t start thinking about this soon. Google will take off and once the leader of the pack starts lengthening the spread it will be VERY difficult to even come close to catching up. Sorry Ask.

In personalization, results revolve around users, not algorithms. It’s about their search history, current tasks, Web history, social patterns, etc. Today it’s difficult for site owners to look at an individual user. With personalization, optimization will happen around themes not keywords. It will be about the long tail and forcing sites to develop based around users. You have to know what your users are looking for.

I personally think this will be better for everyone. It will be more difficult to game the system and the Web will look more like it used to. Instead of pulling up the top 10 e-commerce sites (some of which have gone out of business or have outdated information on their pages) for every search result, users will have some level of control over the results they do get. Instead of relying on some vaguely defined algorithm, you might actually get results for things you are interested in and not just some staid, worn out keyword stuffed site.

Sites will have to become more sticky. Marketers must get people to their site earlier and make them want to bookmark and engage with it. Gord predicts we’ll see a lot of sites building up content and functionality. For every theme we’re going to see circles of importance. These will be inundated with offers for RSS content, widgets and gadgets.

As you all know, I’m all about bookmarking. And stickiness is my middle name. Well, not quite, but I’m a big believer in making a site sticky. We don’t need personalization for developing good principles. But while this has been important since the beginning days of the Web, it will be ever more important now. Google’s emphasis on keywords and links has allowed a lot of people to game the system at everyone else’s expense. With personalization and semantic search, that will be a lot less common.

If you are a webmaster, you should start right now thinking about how to draw people to your website. What will make them come? Better figure it out fast because once personalization catches on like a wave, you’ll hear all the beach bums yelling “Surf’s up!” and you’ll still be on the beach wondering what happened. Now’s the time to think about sticky.

Social bookmarking sites will become even hotter as personalization will enable scalable social search. More use of profiles/personas in SEO.

I’m not sure what Lisa means by “profiles/personas” but I do agree about social bookmarking. It will become hotter and that will make me very hapy. Scalable social search? Yes. Yes, and more Yes.

He argues that Google is making it really easy for SEOs to trick their clients. Clients will look at their sites while logged into their Google accounts, see their sites at number one, and be impressed by all the good work their SEO is doing. Heh.

Don’t worry, I won’t do that to you. But I could see this happening.

If you own a website and you hire someone to do your SEO for you, learn what they’re doing and why. Read up on it a little before you hire your SEO so you can understand what they’re saying when they talk to you. It’s easy to get duped when you don’t know the language and the concepts.

By trying to take advantage of personalized search webmasters become dependant on all of Google’s services. The more users trust Google the less likely they are to experiment with other searches. He’d rather see users experiment with alternative engines and services.

To be fair, Michael offers some suggestions for how Google can improve personalized search.

* Stop hiding that people are logging in in a very obscure part of the screen.
* Be clearer on the SERPs when a result is a personalized search and not a normal result.
* Make it easy for people to turn off or opt out of personalized search. Michael asks if anyone else had trouble signing out of personalized search and a bunch of people applaud.

I don’t agree with all of this. Yes, people will use Google more if they trust it. And personalization will go a long way in helping people trust Google more. But I don’t if that means they’ll use Yahoo less. I’m certain it won’t mean that they’ll use Digg less.

I’m not sure where he’s getting the bullet points here. I don’t see Google hiding anything. When I’m logged into my account, I know it. The second point is a good suggestion. I think if I knew that a certain result was returned because of my own preferences rather than it appearing because it is well optimized (meaning, it would have appeared on my SERP even without the personalization feature turned on) then I’d be more apt to trust it. I’d also like the option of saying, “Please don’t return this result for me any more.”

As far as turning off personalization, it’s not hard. You simply log out of your account. I don’t see why that’s a problem. But if you don’t want certain searches included in your personalized searches and you forget to log out then there’s a problem. However, you can go in and delete those personalized results and they’re gone. So that’s a plus.

Matt says there will always be a need for sites to present themselves well. SEO will never die. Personalization may change the game a little bit. Whenever there is change there’s opportunity. If you’re the SEO who’s crying about progress and change, you’re doing a detriment to yourself. Instead, figure out how to make your site sticky and how to virally grow it. Matt doesn’t think SEO will be exactly what it’s been like in the past but personalization won’t be such a big change that people won’t recognize it.

If there is a gold nugget in Lisa’s article anywhere, I’d say this is it. SEO is here to stay. Period. Don’t fire your SEO because you can personalize your Web searches. For one thing, there will always be people who don’t use the personalization feature, if Google continues to allow that option. Secondly, your personalized results are still following the rules of SEO and Google’s algorithms to some extent. If you are looking for baseball bats then you’ll still get results that are optimized for baseball bats. The difference will be that if you’ve searched for baseball bats before and clicked through to a few pages from your SERP for that search then those pages you clicked through to will appear higher in the results page for you. Eventually, your top 10 results will be based on your own preferences for a certain keyword rather than the algorithms, but if you don’t have 10 preferences then the algorithms will still play a role. That’s SEO.

Secondly, viral marketing will be more necessary as well. If you don’t know how to conduct a viral marketing campaign, now is the time to figure it out because Google Personalization will make it all the more necessary. I’m looking forward to that.

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5 Comments

Comment by Gary Brown

Made Sunday, 10 of June , 2007 at 3:13 am

Yes, as a newbie, I’ve done most everything you’ve mentioned. For me, getting ranked on search terms was the key. I’ve done that with zero page rank. All it takes is links. Just about any kind of link seems to work. Don’t ask me why.

Yuma Insurance / Flagstaff Insurance / Insurance Prescott

Comment by Chris McElroy aka NameCritic

Made Monday, 11 of June , 2007 at 10:17 am

Personalized search is also going to facilitate geo search as well. Those doing geo-seo will benefit from it in my opinion.

Comment by Ammon Johns

Made Sunday, 12 of August , 2007 at 1:29 am

Nick said: “Instead of relying on some vaguely defined algorithm, you might actually get results for things you are interested in and not just some staid, worn out keyword stuffed site.”

Sheesh! You moan about Lisa Barone’s writing style then throw your toys out of the pram in a literary sense about the algorithms built by some of the brightest scientists in the field of Information Retrieval, presumably because you’re not very good at understanding them.

Hav you considered that maybe with your opinions about “vaguely defined algorithms” (which are not at all vague to those who devise and define them in pure maths) and the suggestion that every highly ranked website is “just some staid, worn out keyword stuffed site” that maybe you’re focusing on the wrong field?

I thought this was going to be a search engine optimization journal and instead I find a search engine pessimism sulk. Maybe you should adjust your meta tags or something?

Comment by namecritic

Made Sunday, 12 of August , 2007 at 2:55 am

lol @ammon. I suppose you understand and know google’s algo. It is vaguely defined to all but those who are involved in writing it, so the post was correct. Unless of course you are going to reveal that you wriote google’s algo and plan to reveal it to all of us here. I await your revelation.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Sunday, 12 of August , 2007 at 8:34 am

I see that NameCritic got the gist.

Ammons, thanks for your input. As NameCritic says, the algorithms are vaguely defined by all except those who write them. As an SEO practitioner or webmaster who was not involved in the writing of Google’s algorithms, we are all operating in the dark in some sense regarding how the algorithms work. Our only tools for figuring them out are our collective wit and experimentation. Then, the closest we can get is an inductive inference. Just when we think we’ve got it all figured out, the search engines go and change their algorithms and we have to start the scientific process all over again.

Oh, and for the record, I never said every highly ranked website, nor have I suggested it, is worn out and keyword stuffed. But those sites do appear at the top of some searches. Can you deny that?