Google recently announced another big change in how they will be presenting search results. They are extending their Personalized Search to everyone, this means all Google users, whether logged in or not, will start seeing personalized results.

Google explains Personalized Search:

For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

The customized search results are based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. And you can tell when customized results are being shown because a “View customizations” link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how Google customized your search results and also let you turn off the customization. But I’m guessing the average “Joe web surfer” won’t know about the personalizations or how to turn them off.

Previously Personalized Search was only provided to users who were logged into a Google account and had Web history enabled (Google has it turned on by default when creating a new account).  This caused some confusion with many of our Dallas SEO clients as they began to see their own site rankings fall in the search results pages for their major keywords. Clients would call in a panic about their rankings and I would explain about Personalized Search and most of the time the client was logged into Google and once they logged out their own site was back to ranking where they had previously seen it. Turns out these clients had been studying their competition’s websites for their main keywords and were not clicking on their own sites, so Google assumed they actually preferred the competitor’s sites over their own.

So what does this mean for SEO?

As WebProNews puts it:

Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.

Rest assured the internet marketing team at MasterLink is keeping abreast of the changes at Google. I don’t personally foresee this affecting the way we preform SEO, but may increase the need for social media marketing on sites like Facebook and Twitter to reach your targeted audience.

The biggest change I see happening is that focusing on keyword rankings to gauge a SEO campaign’s success will become completely irrelevant as everyone will be seeing different results for the exact same queries based on past browsing history (if they have not figured out how to turn it off). So, as always, but even more so now, we will focus on actual results that show a positive ROI to determine success. Is your site gaining traffic for your top keywords as well as long tail keyword phrases? Are you getting more conversions, sales, leads from your website? These are the types of statistics a results-orientated, ROI-focused SEO campaign should be tracking. SEO for rankings is dead!

If you haven’t heard, Google has been working on a major update on the architecture for Google’s web search. The update, named “Caffeine”, was made available for testing by the public back in August at the following site: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ but the test search engine has now been replaced with a message from Google:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Google engineer, Matt Cutts talks more about the Google Caffeine update in this WebProNews interview:

The official Caffeine announcement states “The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.”  Google says they’ve mostly focused the changes around infrastructure, indexing and speed.  Though some SEOs who have analyzed the new search results speculate that they are giving even more weight to authority sites.

Matt Cutts says “I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays” adding that most searchers won’t immediately notice a difference with Caffeine but they want to minimize the stress on webmasters during the holiday season.

So what does this all mean? Well, beginning next year we can likely expect to see rankings doing a little dance in the search results pages for a while but the main differences, according to Google, will be that we will see more pages being indexed and faster search results.

Google recently made another announcement regarding their Flash indexing capabilities. Last year they announced they had learned to crawl and index Adobe Flash content. At that time I covered the announcement with my opinion that Google’s indexing of Flash content does not equal that of properly optimized HTML content. This time around the improvements seem to be based on googlebot’s interaction with Flash content, such as clicking buttons as well as improved indexing of external files.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, we can:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

The blog post uses an example that shows Flash content in an external file ranking in Google results where it was not previoulsy. The query [2002 VW Transporter 888] returns this result:

When checking the source code of the resulting page the searched for terms do not appear. Checking Google’s cache of the page shows us that the phrase is not found on the page.

You can see that Google shows us their default message when the text is not found in the HTML source of the page, “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page”.  I checked both Yahoo Site Explorer and SEOmoz’s LinkScape and both reported zero links to the page. So, yes, I think that proves that Google is not only indexing Flash but also ranking the content.

However, I’d like to see an example of a competitive phrase contained only in Flash content ranking well in Google. The phrase “2002 VW Transporter 888″ is obviously not very competitive with only around 23k pages appearing for the phrase in Google’s index of billions of pages. Until I see Flash content ranking for competitive phrases I will still recommend to all of my clients that all of their desired keywords are contained within properly optimized HTML text on the page.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I’m not entirely against using Flash as part of interactive web design. MasterLink uses Flash in many new web sites as part of the overall design. But HTML text will always be the focus for competitive SEO as far as I am concerned.

SEOMoz posted their SEO Best Practices today and gave their opinion on SEO and Flash:

Although we believe the search engines can crawl Javascript and Flash in a limited capacity, we choose not add the risk. Their ability to parse these languages is inferior to their ability to parse HTML and choosing to code in the former can lead to lower search engine rankings.

I wholeheartedly agree. What do you think about this announcement from Google? Will it change the way you SEO your sites?

Experience has taught me that corporations like to make certain that every bit of their resources are dedicated to a task. That is why I was wondering what Google had in mind when they blocked the automatic page ranking programs like WebPosition Gold.

WebPosition Gold and other similar programs consume search engine resources every time they are run. Google has threatened to block them for this very reason for years, but they have only enforced the threat recently.

Now, according to John at PPC Hero, Google is going to creating a QA Score for each individual search query for each Adwords ad that is applicable. That sounds like a massive undertaking that requires a significant amount of resources, since there are literally billions of search queries performed daily. It seems more than coincidental that the two changes are occurring at roughly the same time. What do you think?