Personalized Search-What Is It?

Personalized Search-What Is It?
By Vickie J. Scanlon

Personalized search by Google means that the search results that Google provides will be aimed at relevancy to the individual user and not just the average user. This type of search was offered to sign-in users, but now they are expanding outward to include signed-out users as well.

So what does that mean to those who are utilizing SEO? It means that Google is customizing the users search according to previous searches. For SEO that means that people will not be seeing the same results as other people-because of their (the users) past searches.

How does this affect SEO. Some have suggested that it could make you rethink SEO in a broad light. You may: 1) need to utilize more long-tail keyword phrases versus just the high ranking keywords (but if you're a small website-you may already be doing this-if you're not, you should be.); 2) may have to utilize Adwords to draw traffic with a new web page.

However, the user can turn off personalized search. So how do you do it?


How to turn off personalized search-

To disable history-based search customizations you will need to remove Web History from your Google Account.
You can choose to remove individual items.

1) In the top right corner of the search results page-click Web History
2) Click disable customizations on the resulting page

Or you can delete the current cookie storing searches from within your browser and start fresh. Will personalize search cause a problem for SEO?

Maybe, but if you include several long-tail keywords in your content it can help blunt the change. As would be the case, if individual searchers decide to turn off the personalized search that Google has put into place when they browse.