Before Google, which arrived on the scene at the turn of the millennium there was quite a simple process to get to the top of the search engines. Basically it was determined by the number of times your keyword appeared on your site. So if you were selling pink shoes the aim would be to get the phrase pink shoes in the text of your website as often as possible, without making your site unusable. This led webmasters and SEO experts to come up with more and more ingenious ways of getting keywords into a website. When Google arrived it changed everything.



Google introduced the concept of PageRank which determined how important a website was by the number of links it had. This saw the internet as a spider web of pages that were all linked up. The closer your website was to the centre of the web, the more links it would have ant the more important it was. If your site is right on the edge of the spider web then it may only have one or two links and is a lot less important to the overall structure of the web. However Google also gave importance to the text that was used in your link as this gave a clue as to the content of your website. As Google increased in market share we have seen a surge of directories that will give you free links along with many other similar sites.

It is clear to see that SEO is not going to stand still and that more changes will be implemented and probably very soon. The question that we always need to ask is what will the next change be? At the moment the answer clearly is the increase in personalised search.

What does personalised search mean? Basically Google has a large number of free services that it offers us. When we use these services Google will collect the data to put together our personalised search history. This will enable them to return results that are personal to us when we are logged in and search. Below is a list of ways that personal search will affect you and your website:

1. There are now no guarantees that the rankings you see will be what other people see. You can log out of Google to get the general rankings but it is unlikely that people searching will do this so it will not be possible to know the results that other people get.

2. With Google using the information that it gathers from its other services like its toolbar, Google chrome and other such things, user experience will become vital to SEO.

3. It is possible that with all this data collection Google will be reducing the emphasis on links to a site. It does not mean they will not use this data but it may no longer be central to the ranking process.

4. It will no longer be possible to estimate your traffic volumes. Currently it is possible to look at the average monthly search volumes and then multiply this by the percentage of searchers that click on a website in a certain position to get the average monthly traffic. However with everyone getting personalised search results it will not be possible to use this measure as your site will be in a different position for different searchers.

5. Measuring your rankings is becoming less important as it will be different in different places. Obviously if you are in position 1 on your search results it is unlikely you will be on page 6 for someone else but without proper testing we will not know. It will become more and more important to focus on traffic volumes and to see them increase as a measure of success of your SEO campaign.

The concept of personalised search is not new, we just need to be aware that over the coming years it will become more and more important to search engines. Google are again shaking things up a driving search forward. Whether we like it or not measuring your ranking is becoming less and less important.