Personalized Search On Google – Good Idea For SEO?

Google tries to personalize your search results. Google keeps track of what you are searching for on Google.com. It can however only keep track of your searches while you are logged into you Gmail account – otherwise how will it know who you are ?

So, as long as you are logged onto Gmail and simultaneously searching for something on Google then everything you search and every web page you click on will be stored against your Gmail account details.

The reason Google does this is because it would like to personalize your search as much as possible.

If you are regularly searching on Google for ‘tunturi treadmills’ and usually clicking on the same of couple of websites (from the results), then Google assumes that you like these two websites more than the others.

So if the first few times these results were 7th and 8th on Google rankings, pretty soon Google bumps them up to higher rankings – higher rankings only when you are searching for ‘tunturi treadmills’ and while you have your Gmail account logged on.

Not such a bad idea – Personalized search does make things easier and is more personal. But the problem occurs if you are an internet marketer.

I sell handwriting ebooks on one of my websites. You can view this website by clicking – Handwriting Worksheets. I am constantly checking links and trying to push this site higher up in Google for the keyword ‘handwriting worksheets’.

As a result I visit this website quite often. And I also usually have my Gmail account logged on. Google now assumes that I love my own handwriting ebooks site. And so, now when I search for ‘handwriting worksheets’, my site shows up at number 3.

If I however log out of Gmail and then search for ‘handwriting worksheets’, then my website shows up at number 10.

You don’t have to be a genius to guess that number 10 is the true ranking for my website. Number 3 is a personalized search result – Number 3 result is a false indicator.

And so, if you are interent marketer and need to check rankings of your website, make sure you log out of your Gmail – There are other options like cleaning cookings, changing browsers and using a different computers ect…

For now I prefer logging out of Gmail when I am checking my rankings.

Do you like Personalized Google Search – What are your opinions ?

Best,