「個人化搜尋」與「搜尋引擎優化」: Personalized Search and SEO

我們在”Personal search is coming : 個人化搜尋將全盤改變SEO“, 及”Google Personalized Search : 個人化搜尋中文界面問世“, 談過很多次了, 搜尋引擎的「個人化搜尋」發展將讓「搜尋引擎優化」的作業必須完全的改變, 否則將無法發揮效果 …

原本Google的「個人化搜尋」只有在登入Google帳號才會啟用, 但是現在你沒有登入帳號可能也會影響

如上圖, 當你沒有登入Google帳號而進行Google Search時, 你可以點選右上方的「網頁記錄」去看是「啟用」或「停用」個人化搜尋

Google關於這個功能的說明影片如下

現在各種搜尋引擎幾乎都很注意「使用者經驗」, 不管是Google,Yahoo,Bing都提供許多個人化選項, 這個都只是「界面的個人化」, 現在已經是開始「資料的個人化」, 也就是你看到的資料跟我看到的資料可能是不同的

「個人化搜尋」的結果讓傳統SERP的效果已經被稀釋, 因此把焦點放在SERP是沒有意義的

我們在”搜尋行銷與關鍵字 : 由Ask.com的統計談起“說只注意SERP而沒有流量是無意義的, 只注意主關鍵字而忽略長尾關鍵字也是無意義的….所有的重點就是說:

搜尋引擎優化的目的不能只注意SERP而忘記流量及使用者, 只做給搜尋引擎看而忘記使用者, 是捨本逐末的事情

如果大家還在強調哪些關鍵字排在第一頁或第一名, 而無法讓流量真正提升, 以及真正反應到銷售的話, 這種「搜尋引擎優化」或「搜尋引擎行銷」只是在消耗你的預算而已 …

後記: 2009/12/14

自從各搜尋引擎推出各種「個人化搜尋」的功能之後, 在網路上引起許多人在討論會如何影響SEO

這篇文章Can SEO Exist Beyond Google Personalization?有許多觀點

其中說到”Why Personalization DOES Impact SEO“, 共有21點說明「會影響SEO」

• If everyone sees different SERPs based on their searching patterns, how can you measure a consistent ranking? How can you reach an audience if their search queries are already *rigged* to show your competitor’s brand?

• On page optimization and link building will no longer have as much influence on your site’s rank for competitive search queries.

• Clients who opt-in to personalization and visit their own sites may have a false impression that their sites are ranking well in the SERPs and cease or refuse SEO services.

• Clients who opt-in to personalization and visit their competitor’s sites may have a false impression that their sites AREN’T ranking well in the SERPs and blame their SEO.

• Companies / brands with more traffic have a better chance to gain new business because searchers will see more impressions of snippets to their sites. This creates branding opportunities via snippets.

• Webmasters will start optimizing more for other search engines like Bing where they can have more of an impact on organic results.

• It will become even more difficult to rank for generic keywords and search phrases (as larger brands will tend to dominate based on market search share), meaning long tail search queries will become much more important in an SEO campaign.

• Search spam should start to be filtered out as very few people will be revisiting spammy pages. That should eventually push more relevant, naturally optimized pages higher up the SERPs, particularly those in competitive industries.

• Fresh content will give sites an advantage because new pages are more likely to stand out to searchers in personalized SERPs. Same goes for real-time content generated by Twitter, Facebook etc. Static sites are going to fall to oblivion.

• Audience targeting and snippet relevancy will become more important when optimizing web pages.

• PPC ads will have to try harder to compete with increasingly brand-biased SERPs.

• PPC will become more popular as people find organic SEO too complex and abandon it.

• Personalization should help normally lower ranked sites to get to the top a little faster via loyal customers and visitors.

• Titles, META descriptions and text snippet optimization will become SEO priorities.

• Top SERP performers will fall down the ranks if their snippets and offerings are not competitive enough, allowing lower ranked sites to take over.

• Manually checking your site rankings, or those of your clients with personalization switched on will result in skewed, inaccurate SERPs.

• Rank checking tools like WebPosition will no longer be accurate. Clients will stop asking for ranking reports (hooray!).

• Some think that Google could be using personalization to monitor user-driven search in order to tweak the PageRank algorithm based on what users actually search for.

• Brand new sites targeting competitive search queries have very little chance of appearing in SERPs customized by personalization, even with SEO.

• If you don’t rank well now for your target search queries, you might slip further and further off the radar as searchers refine their SERPs by clicking on the higher ranked sites.

• If clicking on SERPs begins to impact what users see, hackers may develop malware etc. that automates SERP clicking.

其中說到”Why Personalization DOESN’T Impact SEO“, 共有5點說明「不會影響SEO」

• Personalization has been in place for some time already – since 2005 in fact.

• The main Google PageRank algorithm still applies, it’s just the delivery of the results that has changed.

• Any SERP emphasis is user-driven rather than algorithm driven and personalization changes only relate to search queries closely aligned to your web history.

• Most non-personalized SERPs are not identical these days anyway. There is evidence of changes even based on the same search query on same PC in the same location a few minutes apart. Different datacenters and Everflux between them mean consistently shifting SERPs.

• SEO isn’t just about SERP ranking. Think usability, keyword selection, conversion design, branding, social media, online reputation management etc.

應該很明顯到底「個人化搜尋」會不會影響「搜尋引擎優化」的操作 …

SEORoundTable的文章”SEOs Freak Out: Google To Personalize All Search Results“更指出:

Most people had no idea how to even log into Google. Now, Google is personalizing results by default and these same people will have no idea how to turn off personalization.”>Most people had no idea how to even log into Google. Now, Google is personalizing results by default and these same people will have no idea how to turn off personalization.

以前許多人可能不會搜尋時登入Google…但現在很多人是不知如何取消「個人化搜尋」的選項 …