The world of Internet search is changing fast, especially the world of Google search.
You may have noticed when doing searches that there are a lot real-time results such as Twitter, Facebook and other social network content, although Google can only index status updates from Facebook Pages – which are “for organisations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner.”
Bing have a deal in place with Facebook that goes further, indexing individuals’ status updates which have been set to public and Yahoo! have also started to integrate Tweet content.
Another big change on Google is the personalised search. This had an effect if you were logged into your gmail or any other Google account, but now you don’t have to be logged in. This means individuals will see an increasingly different result to another individual.
This isn’t great news for those concerned with SEO as you no longer know where your website will rank. When a result has been clicked a number of times, then that site will start to appear higher up in the search rankings for that visitor.
Personalised search is nothing new.
It all started in 2004 with a beta release through Google labs allowed users to refine search results based on their interests. Then, in mid-April, 2005, Google rolled out its search history feature called “My Search History.” This kept track of all the users’ searches and every page that they viewed from the search results. This time Google required users to have an active Google account. The process has been refined along the way climaxing with the recent change.
Personalised search involves many, many factors. Among them are:
- Geo-graphic factors (local top-level domain, IP address and query analysis)
- Technical factors such as browser, OS capabilities, cookies and toolbars)
- Time of day, time of year and other historical data
- Behavioural query history, interaction with search engine result pages and interactions with advertising and surfing habits).
So what actions can be taken in regards to personalised search?
Well best SEO practices still stand and these factors have become more important:
Factors such as demogaphics, keyword/phrase targeting strategies, quality content, search result conversion, freshness, site useability, social bookmarks, and analytics will all have an impact on your SERPS.
Practically this means:
- Get to know and research your audience and give them the (great) content they want
- Titles and Snippets that are compelling will attract a better click through rate which will in turn help these sites/pages rank better
- Make social bookmarking available and easy to do on your website
- Google Analytics will help in measuring both paid and organic traffic flows
- A logical navigation and architecture for a quality end user experience
Google Caffeine
Google also recently introduced Google Caffeine which ranks pages faster, giving you quicker results. And your page load times will now be a factor in ranking on Google. Simply put, the slower a page loads, the lower it will be ranked.
Google describes Caffeine as:
“a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”
Of course this all has implications for your search engine optimisation and your online business strategy and something to be well aware of! 
