Some of you reading this blog may be aware that if you search within your Google account, or ‘iGoogle’ page, your search results are personalized, particularly for regular searches or sites you frequently visit. This means certain sites are pushed higher up in search results as you visit them more often.
However, Google has announced that they are starting to personalize search outside of Google accounts, so now you don’t even have to be logged into your iGoogle page or account to be served personalized search results. For more information about this, you can read the post on the official Google Blog and don’t forget to take a look at the short video which explains it in a bit more detail.
So what does this mean for website owners? Well for a while I’ve been saying that running ranking reports to see how your keywords are faring in the search engines is just a guide and now this means they’re even more so. What results you may see when querying Google to see how your keywords are performing could be completely different from what someone else sees, so judging the performance of your optimization on rankings actually gives no real insight into the success of your SEO efforts.
There’s no harm in typing the odd query into Google, but the real results are seen in your web stats, such as Google Analytics. If you’re not looking at them on a regular basis, then you’re missing out on important information and how your site is really performing. Reviewing the trends over a period of time will give you a much better indication as to the performance of your SEO then just checking rankings and obsessing over the position of your keywords.
So make it your new years resolution to worry less about rankings but more about what visitors are doing on your site and where they’re coming from!
