Is Google Getting Too Personal? - The SEO Implications
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There is some serious disagreement as to the SEO implications of this change. David Berkowitz writing for Media Post Publications stated the contrarian view: “I can sum up the best strategy in one word: nothing.” In short, he thinks that SEOs need to continue doing what they’ve been doing, assuming that they’re also taking into account the changes in strategy necessitated by the rise of social bookmarking, social search, and other web 2.0 changes.
He also raised an excellent point that should help quell the panicky SEO: “Most Google users won’t be logged in while searching.” We don’t know whether that’s true or not. But we don’t have any statistics as to how many people actually are logged in when they do a Google search. I certainly couldn’t tell you myself how often I’m logged in when I search Google. Given that it’s really easy to do a Google search whenever you’re online regardless of whatever else you happen to be doing (like checking email), it’s entirely possible to be logged in and not know it. Until I see some numbers, I’m going to have to reserve judgment on how much of an effect this is going to have on search as a whole.
If you are concerned – and there is perhaps some justification for it – there are some things you can do. You can prompt visitors to add your site to their Google Bookmark file. You can ask visitors to add an RSS feed from your site to their version of Google’s home page; there’s an Add to Google button you can use to accomplish this trick. You can get more information about how to do that at the following link: http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html.
Danny Sullivan describes this change as “cataclysmic…Personalized search is now the default and none too easy to escape from either through opt-out.” He recommends working on optimizing for Google services (as I described above), optimizing for social search sites, establishing some kind of profile within social networks such as MySpace, engaging with bloggers, and similar web 2.0 tactics. “Technical skills are still needed, but imagination and knowledge of the social spaces our customers inhabit are gaining value, which ultimately means that the sky is the limit on what you can do.”
Or you could always try the approach that Google Blogoscoped discovered and Search Engine Watch reported on. It actually has the taint of black hat about it, and strangely enough, it still works. It’s a way to insert search spam into people’s Search Histories. I don’t recommend it by any means, but it certainly illustrates how people will always try to come up with a way to hack the system, even when it’s designed to make spamming extremely difficult.
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