New Brand of SEO?

According to Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch, there is a new brand of SEO coming to town. Google is planning on releasing personalized search which orders your search results based on things you have searched for in the past.

So, exactly how would that work? According to Google, it would work like this:

For the query [bass], Google Personalized Search may show the user results about the instrument and not the fish if that person was a frequent Google searcher for music information.

Google would monitor the types of searches that you do and then monitor what results you click on to decide which results to show you in future searches.

In this way, Google hopes to rank the search results which are more suited to the searcher higher in the ranking order.

Another neat aspect of the personalized search is that you can turn it off. If you just want regular search results, you can set Google to return those types of results or you can have Google tailor your results accordingly.

What will this mean for the future of SEO? If people are conducting personalized searches, will pagerank matter as much? Pagerank wouldn’t really matter at all, considering each search would be specific to each unique user.

According to this article, it seems that search engines are supporting the change to personalized searches because they help curb spam problems. People who engage in personalized searches can also block pages which is an added issue for those sites trying to obtain ranking–what’s the point if someone just blocks your site anyway?

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