How do SEO experts deal with personalization?
The search market industry via Wikipedia
The little challenging question for today. Yesterday I wrote about the destructive approach by Google and Yahoo to search by personalization of the search results. My question for today is, how does this new industry of search engine optimization (SEO) experts deal with the issue of personalization of searches? Are they, just like myself, cheating themselves and others, or do they have actually tricks to undo the personalization dilemma? Tricks I could possibly use too?
We have looked at more information coming from Eli Pariser, but he remains pretty silent on the option of ‘switching off’ the personalization features. Such a switch would potentially damage the earning capacities of search engines, although Pariser gives enough political arguments why it should be at least an option.
Of course I googled the issue
First result was this neat little video by the Seostrategy group. They explain how you can, after you have signed in with your Google-account, edit the placement of entries on your search page, and actually leave comments. That is of course very cute to know, but does not address the real issue: what kind of results to I get to start with, and what does the rest of the world see – the holy grail of the SEO. I’m not sure that signing into your account triggers off the personalization only, it looks that the 57 criteria Pariser mentions for personalization have also triggers elsewhere.
The second entry, from ClickZ and already dated from 2007, so well before Google officially started its personalization. The article neatly defines the issues already, but obvious by that date personalization was not yet so overwhelming to become a threat to the livelihood of SEO-experts. So we move lower down my list of search results. (I skip the duplicates).
The next entry, at Internetmarketingcompete.com, the description of the problems becomes larger, at the end a few tools are mentioned, but it does not give me enough confidence to believe that SEO-experts have found a way out from the basic dilemma: how to improve the generic results at search engines – since there are no generic results to begin with.
The next one, has a high ‘I think’ level. “I think more than atany other time, “Content is King” now reigns supreme. The users will be that last layer of the Google algorithm and that means the quality of the content has got to be at the top of its game, surpassingthe competition.” We all hope content is king, certainly content producers like myself, but are we not the prisoners of our own wishful thinking?
As long as the SEO-industry can sell its clothes to the emperor, nobody will start yelling the emperor is naked. Well, actually Eli Pariser did, and perhaps the SEO industry hopes this might just go away. In the end it won’t.
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