Google Web History and Personalized Search Changing the Rules of SEO

The latest edition of Planet Ocean's Search Engine News is MOST revealing for all of us who rely on traffic from Big G. Google has let loose what is potentially their most turbulent feature ever in terms of what will affect our search engine optimization and marketing strategy. The genie is called Web History and it gives Big G an up-close view of the web, promising to reveal the precise surfing habits of millions of Internet users. Web History looks simply like an expansion of features that Google has been offering for a while. They began pushing personalized search under the Search History banner in February. Now they have changed the name to Web History to reflect the fact that they have started tracking your entire web browsing experience and not simply keeping a record of your searches.

Web History now records and stores a full-text version of every site you visit and even makes it available for later viewing. All you need to do is log into your Google Account like Gmail, your Personalized Homepage, AdWords, etc. and have the Google Toolbar installed with the PageRank feature activated. After that, big G keeps going on automatic and you can bet Google will be encouraging people to use it.

In fact, Planet Ocean says they "wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see Google provide even further incentives that effectively require people to keep Web History enabled. After all, the data it sends them is literally priceless! From Google's point of view, Web History puts them into the Internet's catbird seat!"

Google is tracking all this data about where people go and what they look at, and recording the time they spend on a site. You know that this data will find its way into Google's algorithm. This means Google will no longer be guessing about site popularity based on links. Their search results model is clearly moving towards tracking real popularity based on actual traffic and time spent on a site. That means the high ranking websites of the very near future will be the truly popular sites. Sites that get good return traffic and that people spend a lot of time viewing a lot of pages will be the big winners.Since Web History allows Google to so easily track site visitor activity, the sites that offer popular, well-presented content will rank the best. This is just what Authority Site Creator is designed to do!

This also means that RSS feed subscriptions through Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage, bookmarking through social sites like Technorati and Del.icio.us as well as private bookmarking sites like Google Bookmarks, and other means of tracking popularity are all likely to become increasingly important as ranking factors from now on. As for Google this means that pay-per-click or any sort of advertising geared to increase traffic will add to their bottom line. This also means getting good links and endorsement will become a front running search engine strategy. Once an enabled user clicks your listing, browses several pages and spends time on your site, and returns to visit your site again, the chances of your site ranking high in future searches by that user increases considerably. If a really popular site say's 'you're cool' and you really are cool, then your site will be rewarded with traffic that sticks and returns over and over which will lead to your site capturing higher rank and more traffic which raises your stock even further on the popularity scale. This will become the SEO model going forward.

Also incorporated into this latest Big G move is the release of some new features that make use of the data. There's a new button you can add to the Google Toolbar which takes you to a recommended site based on your search history. It also generates 50 new sites per day and is a little like StumbleUpon.com. There's also the option of adding a recommendations tab on your Google Personalized Home page. Google is beginning to insert News results directly into their free organic listings for some popular queries, and this includes images next to the seach results. These news results is are inserted directly into the organic search listings. That means that whoever was in position 10 for this query just got bumped onto page two! Once this feature is unleashed in the mainstream search results Planet Ocean expects traffic to large news sites to skyrocket. And businesses that formerly occupied top positions can expect to feel the agony of being pushed down in the rankings.