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01.21.10 Google Continues To Make Search More Personal  By
David HarryOnce upon a time me and a few cohorts wondered about just what levels of flux there were in the Google SERPs. Has personalized search really changed the consistency of rankings? It's an issue that has been spoken about many times in the search world. We set out to see what was up. After two rounds of research we noticed that this was unlikely to be the case. You can learn more in the post; The SEO guide to Google personalized search. It seemed only sensible, given Google's Psearch expansion, to have another look. And so last December we started a third round. Has anything changed? How much flux is out there? Well, read on and find out what we're seeing so far... Now, first things first; the goal wasn't really to establish how personalized search operates. What we really wanted to know is how much movement is there in the SERPs for a given query type, in a given region (USA in this case). Yes we're also noting some potential personalized search affects, but movement/flux was the core observation. We must understand that even though there is some interesting data here, it is by no means a large enough sample to get nitty gritty with IMHO. It is also important to remember this is a specific task from a quasi-transactional query session (task development). We want to go back and do more from an informational query space and one more suited to respondents (familiar, such as 'learn SEO' etc..). This approach, last time out, did show more movement than we saw with this space (we've done this round 2x now). As always, no magic bullets here... Just more links in the chain (pun intended of course).
The Set up We decided to take a set of queries to build a session (task) in a space that may or may not be familiar to the respondents. The queries we used were; 'antique lamps' 'buy antique lamps' 'buy lamps online' We also asked them to tell us;
• Where they're located (region/country)
• Which browser they're using • Cleared search history lately? • Is personalized/search history on? • Most common Google app used • If they had searched for 'lamps' or furnishings in the last 60 days The goal being to start understanding what may or may not be influencing the search result flux. While we had some questions to be answered, there was no initial bias (hypothesis) behind the analysis. It should also be noted that the entire collection process only lasted 4 days so that we could try our best to avoid any temporal anomalies. Continune reading this article. About the Author: David Harry is the President of Reliable SEO and has been building and marketing websites since 1998. He can be found writing about search and internet marketing on the Fire Horse Trail and is the author of the SEO Handbook series www.reliable-seo.com, www.huomah.com, www.the-seo-handbook.com |
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