Key Points
One of the hot areas in search is personalization. Google recognizes that personalization is a way to offer people better search results. How this works has a big impact on
SEO, and I had the opportunity arise to speak with Jack Menzel and jumped at it. Here are some of the key points from the discussion:
People confuse context with personalization, and these are different things. Context includes factors such as language, location, and time of year.
(Jack) : “A lot of people assume personalization is amazingly pervasive”. In fact only small changes are made to a results page based on personalization. Google recognizes for diverse query results.
Past query history is used for personalization. If you search for “rome”, and then “hotels”, some of the results will be for hotels in Rome.
Past click through history is a factor. If you show a clear preference for one site by clicking on it in the results, then it may be moved up in the results for you.
The recommendations of friends are used in personalization.
Google will look at your friend’s profile to see what networks they have included there, and then see what they recommend on those sites.
(Jack): “When people are signed out, their search results are personalized based on past search information linked to their browser for up to 180 days using an anonymous cookie”.
Appending &pws=0 to the end of a URL does work, but it only removes personalization, it does not remove context (language, location, time of year).
There are ways to turn off all personalized results. Google’s position is that user’s own their data. However, context will still be taken into account.