I’ve seen plenty of people worried about personalized search features that are starting to roll out in search engines such as Google. It’s a scary thought that soon your basic SEO tricks won’t work the way you want them to. You’re going to have to appeal to the user more.

Quite frankly, if you put it that way it shouldn’t seem so bad. Your final goal should always be to keep visitors coming back to you.

Yes, personalized search does mean it is more difficult to figure out where you rank in Google. You won’t be seeing the same results as all your users.

But in the long run it should allow you to focus more on providing great content and appropriate products to your visitors. Yes, I’m sure people will still find ways to game personalized search, but it will take time, and probably won’t be too easy.

People like things to be personalized. That was one of my favorite TiVo features when I lived with my sister. It was fun seeing what TiVo would come up with that we hadn’t thought of on our own. Lots of lousy results, but some really neat ones too.

And I think there will always be a place for habits such as linking correctly to other sites and getting quality links to your sites. If the search engines aren’t being kind to you yet, how else will you be found?

Just remember that the Internet is very much still in its infancy. Things are changing and growing all the time. If you focus on quality you have a better chance of surviving long term.

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