If you haven’t heard about ‘Personalized Search for everyone‘ then read on, if you have then perhaps you would like to read on and discuss the change in the comments section.

Many of you, however, will have seen Google personalised search, which was created to give a more personalised results page. Since December 2009, Google has made personalisation standard, whether you’re signed in or not. If you wish to disable it, you can by clicking the “Web History” tab at the top of Google.

But what about SEO?

There are not as many actual changes as people imagine, but there are some changes that will affect SEO – below are a few ‘facts’ to consider:

* Only queries that a user has made before will be affected, resulting in a lot of possible queries being unaffected
* Positions 1-4 in Google have seen little change
* Positions 5-10 do change a little bit more than usual, but the first page is mostly unchanged.

What has changed with personalised search?

From the point of view of an SEO company, there are several new factors to adjust to, such as the fact ranking placements are not as ‘reliable’ as we thought they once were. With personalised search SEO companies now need to put even more effort in to get as many users to visit the site as possible because one ‘click’ can result in pushing the site to the top of the rankings!

Personalised search may not be the devil that a lot of people in the SEO industry seem to believe, but it will require a little bit of change, and the best SEO companies will take notice rather than ignore the personalisation of Google Results.

And remember – Personalised search or no personalised search – link building is still very important for a successful SEO campaign