Deepblue-digital were recently at a seminar on SEO in Leeds and amongst many new and interesting SEO things learned, we discussed the fact that Google is leaning more towards learning from your searches and then presenting the results based on your previous searches. So if you search for Holidays in Spain a lot and often choose a certain website to book that holiday, then that website will rise up your personal listing automatically. The presenter then indicated that this will eventually (within a year!) make much of the SEO work redundant apart from the changing content aspect. Could this be true?
We decided to put this question to our friends at SEOMOZ and they very kindly replied with the following, it proves interesting reading.
Thanks to Jane Copland at www.seomoz.org/
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This is by no means true. It has a basis in truth, but this is not reality.
The true bit is this: Google will present results based upon your previous searches and browsing history if you’ve visited a site or page before, especially after searching for something for which you’re now searching again. Thus, if you searched for ’savings accounts’ and visited a certain bank, that bank’s page will be raised in your search results in the future if you’re signed into a Google account, or if you’re not signed in, yet you have the setting of providing personalised results enabled.
All of this said, the browsing history and previous search history question is the most important. If you’ve never visited a site in a market before, but you do a search for something from that market, Google can’t personalise your results at all. For example, if you search for ‘cell phones’ but have not recently visited any site for a related query, or any site that provides cell phones, Google can’t personalise anything. Sites for which this is going to be a problem include news vendors, blogs, and sites whose competition revolves heavily around people bookmarking content in their sector and returning frequently. For example, if you’re in the news business, you suddenly have to consider the fact that many people visit cnn.com without using a search engine. Thus, if they go to Google to then search for [haiti earthquake], your news site is at an inherent disadvantage because cnn.com is saved in their web history.
However, this is by no means the end of SEO. We’ve always known that generating return visitors is part of succesful SEO, and now it is even more important. This heightens the importance of social media, brand recognition, loyalty, etc, but it doesn’t mean that we still can’t work with the ten blue links in Google’s regular search. There is no way that this sort of traditional SEO is going away, especially not within the next twelve months.