Over the last 6 months Google has been steering to more personalized search results for its users. Currently searches can be narrowed down to specific geographic areas and can also be personalized to you. Over the last month Google as taken one more step to personalized search with the addition of Google’s Web History. This could be one of the most disruptive changes ever made for SEO’s and Internet Marketing professionals. I will elaborate later.

Google will now be tracking every move you make. Of course they were already doing this to some extent, but now they are willing to reveal the exact surfing habits of millions of users. The new Web History now records the full text version of every site you visit and holds it for later viewing.

What does this mean to the business owner, Internet Marketer, and SEO? Google, if not already, is becoming kind of scary in their quest for the ultimate search results. Now that Google will be tracking every move you make or better yet every move that a person makes on your website. They can now, very accurately, decide if a website is relevant, popular and/or informative.

Google as been able to decipher between good and bad links and has also been slowly devaluing links that don’t meet their standards. With the type of data that Web History will bring they may never have to look at links again. They will only have to evaluate how often people come to your site, do they come back, and how long do they stay. Along with the content on the site and its relevance to the specific search you have recipe for an algorithm that will be difficult to game. Of course those who have been on top of the current changes t0 the Google algorithms will be ahead of the curve. Many of you have been focusing on content for some time now and have seen results. This addition now leaves your ranking in the hands of the people.

Google no longer has to guess about your popularity and relevance.

So now what do you need to be concerned with and how are you going to gain or sustain search placements? You now need to be more strategic about the placement of your content. You now want your users to actually read the content. Before you were writing strictly for the search engines. You now write for the people.

I used to think the new frontier of search was “Natural Search” or “Natural Language Search”. Natural Language search refers to the processing of a search inquiry in a natural linguistic form. Currently search engines base result only of the keywords or phrases. I now can see the light…the new search will still be based on natural search but not the linguistics kind but more the historical kind. Google will now base its results of what is natural and specific for you. Google knows what feeds you read, what sites you visit, what ads you click on, how much you spend (Google checkout), what items you buy and what geographic area you live in. They are rumored to have aligned with Salesforce as well and one can only speculate what they plan on doing with those analytics.

The bottom line is that ranking in the search engines is becoming more natural and relevant and to be successful you will have to be popular. Forget about keyword tags and buying links and concentrate on writing good content that keep people at your site.

Simple enough, right.

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