For those of you that don't keep your finger squarely on the pulse of recent news within the Search industry, Google decided in December to make their
personalised search feature an opt-out feature, as opposed to its former opt-in status. It has been said that the impact on SEO may be quite dramatic.
Personalised search is an initiative by Google to monitor your web history and to promote those websites that you seem to like more than others. For example, if you were searching for DVDs and click more on Play.com results than Amazon, then Google would notice this and serve you more Play.com results than Amazon ones for future queries. In its quest to be everyone's digital best friend, Google is effectively trying to understand what makes you personally tick, and to fit in with that.
There are many professional SEOs that will be sweating a little at the thought of this. To have your website deliberately demoted in favour of the competition is worrying. Also, the thought of not being able to properly track your true ranking position can make for a more difficult client relationship as the ranking position that one person sees is not necessarily the same as that seen by another.
There are many blog posts talking about personalisation, but as a professional recruitment digital marketeer I am actually not that worried. And the reason I'm not that worried is due to the nature of recruitment searching.
Firstly, for most people personalisation won't impact too heavily. Let me give you an example by using a sample of my search history from the weekend:
Philippines
background checks
treasury jobs
laura solon
arkham asylum
eddie izzard dvds
the it crowd
cheap flights to los angeles
glasgow car hire
communicator
taxation recruitment
decorators in en11
the cloak
audit blogs
tracey emin leaves uk
imaginarium
front arena
derren brown books
unicef
imperial war museum
rel="alternate"
graduate forums
google wave
charity donations
satellite TV for pc review
satellite TV for pc software
megalodon
digital PR
When looking through these queries, it becomes very clear that there's not actually a great deal of topical overlap from which to start personalising my results. Sites that are relevant to "Unicef" or "charity donations" are not going to be relevant to "megalodon" or "google wave". In fact, looking through this list, I can see only about 4 topical overlaps, most of which are requests for DVDs/books or travel products. This will be the same for many other people. Our search history is actually quite diverse. As a search professional in the recruitment industry, I will have a lot of recruitment search terms, and the results for those will be heavily skewed by personalisation. I will simply opt-out of the personalisation feature. But for that majority of people who do not use a search engine on an hourly or even minute-by-minute basis throughout the day, personalisation will mostly affect the searches that are high volume to Google and that we all use fairly regularly, i.e. latest news, buying things online, etc. SEO professionals in these industries should be a little afraid.
Now it's true that clicking on Amazon results may result in me receiving book-related results for future queries that do not need them. My request for "audit blogs" for example would be poorly served if Amazon presented a book about financial auditing. It's just not relevant and not what I'm looking for. Personalisation acts within the current algorithm, so a page from a website that you have a history of clicking on needs to be a relatively strong ranking candidate already to receive a ranking boost.
The second point to note for recruitment search is that for many candidates the act of searching for employment is generally something conducted about once every 2 years or so. Contract and temp workers may be at a more frequent interval, but then those workers will have relationships with agencies already, so a form of personalisation has been in place all the time for them anyway. So, for most searchers, we're only looking at a short period of time where job searching is underway. Considering that Google only stores web history information for 180 days, this will mean that for most of these recruitment searches there is no personalisation happening because there is no search history. That history will be gathered throughout the job searching process, and websites may be boosted as a result, but it is my opinion that the effect will not be as heavily felt as in some other industries. The recruitment industry is a little more protected than the book-selling and DVD industry, for example, owing to the nature of job searching.
We cannot ignore personalisation when putting our search marketing strategy together, and it is yet another factor that makes SEO such a difficult art to master and implement properly. SEO is no longer the cheaper solution to search marketing, and for some queries it may take a brand a considerable time to build up the authority needed within that topic field to rank well. Personalised search is another metric to consider, and for those very difficult queries paying for search presence may be not just the only answer, but perhaps the smarter answer.
