Goodbye to SearchWiki!

Even more personalisation this week coming straight from the Google Blog. They're now introducing stars to flag results so that they always show up for you. The example given is so that your favourite American Football team always shows up if you type NFL, for example. Starring your results can be done right in the SERP page of through the toolbar.

The good news is that this (along with sidewiki for those who like to leave comments) is to replace Google's silly "searchwiki" idea. I hope no-one was workingon that niche software I was thinking about?! hehe. According to the official post,

"In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn't like changing the order of Google's organic search results."

Wow. People reaaaaalllllyyyy trust Google, and their search results, and I suppose there's the idea that if you change your results and can never change it back again, you might be missing out on new websites, news, current trends, etc. etc. It's a sensible move from google.



And just so that you know, personalised results are ALWAYS on. You can, of course, see the results WITHOUT this personalisation. Look at the image above, and you'll see a screen shot of being able to view the search results for Barcelona Restaurants without your personal history, for example. To reach this screen, you first have to click the "view customizations" link, which is cleverly positioned top right, where many people won't notice it (space usually reserved for AdWords).



As of today, I'm still seeing the searchwiki links at the bottom of the results pages, so maybe it'll be rolled out slowly over certain data centres before eliminating completely.

Are you unhappy with your website's position in the search engines? I can offer website promotion and help move your site up in the list. And for an instant traffic boost, I also manage Pay Per Click campaigns, too.

Removing Personalisation From Your Google Results - Any Good?

OK, this might be a bit of a techie post - i.e. not just for the everyday user of the internet, and in fact might be a little silly, given recent finds from Dr Pete over at SEOMoz. Still it's an important metric to be aware of within search.

Google has been using personalised search for more than a couple of years now, and recently decided that they will deliver you personalised results in the serps even when you're not signed in. This means that your search history will influence future results, as will other sites tyou visit on a regular basis. In a similar way that GMail scans your mail to provide you with "appropriate" adwords ads within your email, Google likes to control what they present to you in the serps.



So for people like us seos who need to check "reliable" serps for reporting on clients, etc. this can be a bit of a pain. Sure, Webmaster Tools recently intorduced a time-saving "your-site-is-ranking-position-X-for-these-keywords" kind of tool, which is veerrryyy handy, but not always reliable.

So, there is simple way to ensure your results are NOT personalised. You make a search and then add "&pws=0" to the end of the search string in the direction bar at the top of your browser. So for example, if you make a search like this for Barcelona SEO Training you can add on a &pws=0 to the end to DE-Personalise the results. Depending on your IP and your previous search history, you may or many not see a difference here. And as the post from SEOMoz describes above (although hardly exhaustive), it can appear to have little effect anyway - it's just good to know the possibility exists and for this to be exaplianed to clients, too.

Are you looking to improve your website's performance? I can help. Contact me at Barcelona SEO for an informal chat about your site and its possibilities.