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Friday, March 29, 2024

3 Ranking Survival Tips For Google's New Personalized Results

The effects were subtle. The average person searching on Google probably didn’t notice.
For most, the results of last Friday’s rollout of the long-tested, debated and awaited personalized search results
for the masses was an entirely unremarkable event.

For the search marketing industry, it was cataclysmic.

In short, it’s a game changer. Those who adapt quickly or are already ahead of the curve will thrive in the new environment. Those too slow or in denial will perish.

“One page fits all” is now a thing of the past.

Personalized search is now the default and none too easy to escape from either
through opt-out. This means that every search result you click, every link you bookmark, every
RSS feed you subscribe to using Google services can be used to improve your personal search results.

For most, this should be very welcome, as it promises a far better search experience that will adapt to your interests and evolve over time. For
search marketers, it means new skills and techniques are needed to achieve search visibility.

The following three survival tips come with two caveats:

  • There is no way to tell yet what works well and what doesn’t. Some things are obvious and will undoubtedly help.
    Others are pure, albeit educated, conjecture.
  • This is not a "how to rank in Google guide." There’s quite a bit more to it than this. Having said that, for the new personalized
    search pages, I think these should stand you in good stead.

1) Optimize For Google Services

The three Google services you might want to socially optimize for are:

As Danny covered in his
write-up on Google
Personalized Search last week, information from the first two is now used to
influence your search results:

Beyond your search history, Google also looks at the content on your Google
Personalized Homepage – what gadgets you have there, feeds you are reading and
so on — in order to shape your personalized search results. This is a new
signal they’ve just started to use. Another new signal is Google Bookmarks.
Pages you save in these also influence the results.

Google Reader information isn’t apparently being used, but it would be very
odd if Google doesn’t use your clicking and reading habits from that in the
future to also influence search results.

Given the new importance of these services, making your pages easy to add to
them makes sense — if you can bear having to promote Google services on every page
in your site just to get a leg up the search results!

Personally I tend to avoid such things, reasoning that a clean page sets tone for content.
But in light of this recent change in the order of the Googleverse, I may have to rethink.

Want to get going yourself? Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage have a
helpful page
explaining how to create buttons for those services. Put these
on your site and encourage those subscriptions.

Google doesn’t seem to offer much in terms of Google Bookmark buttons that I
could find. But there are third-party solutions such as
AddThis,
AddToBookmarks and

3spots
. Also check out Graywolf’s

Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets
guide. If you use FeedBurner,
FeedFlares are
an easy way to add Google Bookmark buttons to your site, as you’ll see done at
the bottom of this column.

2) Optimize For Social Search

Social
search sites
such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Bluedot and StumbleUpon are often accused (particularly in the case of Digg) of sending largely useless
and even unwanted traffic. And for some kinds of sites they’re just wholly inappropriate. However, if you can, you should
get traffic from them to help with Google.

Help with Google? Yes, and here’s
why.

It’s not about Digg anymore. It’s about all those slavering technoyobs with the Google toolbar installed, using Google bookmarks or
Google Reader. It’s also about how thousands and thousands of bloggers use Digg
and similar sites to source content and stories for their own blogs.

The knock-on effect, as we’ve come to know it, is what social search is all
about. Thousands or even hundreds of thousands of bloggers and geeky web folks
can hit your pages and use Google services to tag them, subscribe to your feeds,
shag itâ„¢ or just have their interest in your page recorded more quietly. That’s
quite possibly very good news indeed.

3. Optimize For Social Networks

People are widely acknowledging the growth and buzz about social search and how
those sites can drive traffic. But what about social networks?

Social networking means finding the movers and shakers, those who can swing traffic your way on the
blogosphere. It can also mean finding them through formal social networking
sites like MySpace.

Establishing a presence inside relevant social networks can be a daunting task.
However, more and more organizations are taking the plunge. Here are a few first steps you can make this week:

  • Establish a MySpace profile
  • Identify and engage with the blog influencers
    in your niche
  • Start blogging yourself. You can take notes from
    these guys
  • Institute a viral link building program to help propel your blog into circulation

  • Build a remarkable
    widget
    that can be embedded into profile pages on social networks like Bebo and MySpace that will drive traffic to your site.

The list could go on, and that’s what’s so wonderful about the current changes we’re seeing in
search and web marketing. Technical skills are still needed, but imagination and knowledge of the social spaces our customers inhabit are gaining in value, which ultimately means that the sky is the limit on what you can do.

In future articles for Search Engine Land, I’ll go into more details on this last point.
In the meantime, do drop comments and questions in the box beneath. I’ll be happy to continue the discussion there.

Nick Wilson is a contributing writer for
Search Engine Land and the CEO and
senior strategist for Clickinfluence, a
dedicated social media marketing agency.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


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