How will Google Personalized Search affect affiliate marketing?

December 8, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 17 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Attracting Visitors 

How much do you know about Google’s personalized search feature?

For some time now, if you were signed in to Google (through any of the accounts you may have there), your search results were subject to being personalized.

I first realized how important this was when I was doing some search engine optimization and promotion for a client. I told my daughter that we were already getting page one placement for that client and she said she didn’t see it.

That’s when I remembered that I was logged in to Google. When I logged out, and did the search again, the results were different. My client was not on page one and these new results were consistent with what my daughter saw when she did the same search.

So, after that, when I was testing search results, I had to remember to log out of Google.

Last Friday, however, Google rolled out personalized search results for everyone and you’ve been opted-in by them automatically, whether you are aware of it or not.

Here’s their announcement…

Personalized Search for everyone

Now, personally, I think this has potential for real differences in how people see search results and I think it’s going to get more different over time.

How good or bad it is would depend upon how you’re using the search engines – Google, specifically.

As a marketer, I’m not much in favor of it and won’t be until I see how it affects traffic flow in the future. I’ve worked hard for many years to rank well for some search terms and this has the potential to destroy all that effort. I don’t know that it will, but it might, so I’m going to try to watch and see what happens.

As a user, it may have its benefits, but, again, only time will tell. I am not happy that Google opted me into this with no say on my part, however. I want a way to turn it on and off, and at this time, I don’t know if that’s possible. I’m still learning about it.

Danny Sullivan wrote an excellent post on the topic…

Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention

Danny knows a lot more about all this than I do and I’ll be watching to see what else he has to say on this topic.

So, what do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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