Nov 22, 2008

Will personalised & behavior-based search to kill ranking... and SEO?

yes, i believe there will be a radical change around how seo is performed. The biggest change from google is the recent Google SearchWiki.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-searchwiki.html

This tool has the potential to increase your returning visitors, because if they already like your site but dont bookmark it and always find it by search, that is great. But this same behaviour will may make it hard for newer sites to get to the top of their personalisation lists, if the user is making good use of the remove site for travel operators and you launch a brand new travel site, you may find that you never make it into their list because they automatically remove all but their favourite sites.

From Yahoo camp there is Glue which offers a more global behaviour based search for all visitors. http://glue.yahoo.com/

Yahoo Glue search results, are biased towards informational searches and change based on business or interest based search, but dont seem to be influenced by geographic location at this stage.

I think there is room for a focus around behavioural based search, but it will require a lot more resources and research than previous campaigns have required.