Google Personalization: Tips For Site Owners and Searchers

Posted at January 18, 2010

Google personalization of search results continues to be a hot topic of conversation and most people aren’t happy about it. There are privacy concerns, some people have concerns about getting sites ranked, some people feel it doesn’t actually help improve their results.

Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s here (at least for now). So here are a couple tips to help you manage it…
Tips for the site owner:

We don’t pay that much attention to Meta Description tags anymore but with personalization, your Meta tags may be more important now. The reason? If your Description tag is what comes up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and it often is – then it has to do a good job of compelling people to click. Once they’ve clicked once, you are more likely to continue to come up high for related searches for that person.

Crafting your Meta tags so they entice people has always been important but now it’s even more so.

Secondly, continuing to build relevant content that uses keyword phrases people are likely to search for is still important. Throwing in the towel and saying that you aren’t likely to make it against the big guys with personalization in place just guarantees you won’t do well.

We’ve seen client rankings and traffic grow recently and we don’t buy into any of the talk about the death of SEO or the little guy being screwed by personalization. Things change and evolve and as long as you are aware and are changing and evolving too, you’ve got a shot. The more you do to optimize your site, built links and participate in social media, the better. OK, enough of my little rant for the day.

Now a tip for the searcher:

If you don’t want search personalization turned on, click Web History up on the top right of your screen and you will get the following option:

google history

Click the link to disable customization. Easy!

Want to talk about your site and see how you can improve your search rankings? Simply request a no-obligation SEO proposal here or email jennifer@ecombuffet.com for your consultation.

I’d love to hear any comments, feedback or questions.

To Your SEO Success,

Jennifer Horowitz, Director of Marketing