Does Google’s Personalisation of Search Results mean SEO is Dead?

Posted by: gmessenger

Early this year Google released a change to its search engine that made personalisation of the search results a reality for Australians. Previously personalisation had been tested in various markets in limited releases and versions.

The personalisation is performed using data it collects about your search behaviour whilst you are logged into your Google account or by your IP.

Since Google released its latest change to the interface early this year I have had the following question put to me a number of times; "Does SEO have a future' given Google's dominance & approach to modifying search results based on personalised click behaviour towards previously served ads".

The simple answer to this is "Yes, SEO is still important".

Even though users often have results served to them based on personalisation factors, the underlying algorithm and results based on that algorithm are still there. For your website to be considered for those results and the potential personalisation of those results, it still needs to be optimised correctly.

If your website is not optimised towards the right words and is not built in a way to allow Google to provide it with the most relevant rank, you will be unlikely to appear in results, personalised or not.

Remember that users can still turn off the personalisation of results through the Google interface and by clearing privacy data. I think this is something that Google will need to be careful to allow users to continue to have control over.

What the changes do mean is that optimisers cannot rely on ranking results to prove the success of SEO to clients.

This change has been coming for quite some time now and most optimisers will use rankings as a guide to what movement is happening from their search engine optimisation efforts and instead use analytics data as a true measure of the success of a campaign. Remember, top rankings are useless if they do not result in traffic & conversions.

Google may have the dominant search share in Australia and within many other markets, but if they do not provide the ability for users to find new websites & information easily, a competitor like Bing will and it could be the mistake that costs them market share.

Google have not made this mistake in over 15 years now and I doubt they will make it anytime soon by allowing personalisation of search results to stop people finding the information they are searching for.

So keep search engine optimising your website so that Google can rank it and people can find it.

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