What is Personalised Search?

If you are logged in with your Google account when surfing the internet then the results that you see when performing a search are skewed by your previous search behaviour.  In a nutshell, Google keeps a record of your searches and your search activity and gives you a personalised search result based on this history. If you log out of your account you are shown Search Results without bias.

What effect does this have on SEO?

We find now that search results differ from user to user based on their search behaviour and history. Search queries do show a change in website ranking positions between personalised and non-personalised results.

From a user perspective, personalised search brings about more relevant results and the more ingenious that Google et al become with this service offering the more value will be added to the user's experience.

White Hat SEO represents all the techniques used to legitimately get a website ranking as highly as possible in the list of search results returned by a Search Engine. These techniques are shaped by our 'knowledge' of the algorithms that the Search Engines use to rank a website.  When Personalised Search is turned 'on' a user is effectively over-riding this algorithm and in turn overriding the SEO efforts applied to that site.

What Can We Do?

What we can do is optimise a site using Industry best practice and do everything we can to increase Page Rank. By being the best site it can possibly be from an SEO point of view, a site is more likely to rank well regardless of these modified algorithms.