Sorry guys! It is really embarrassing that this place has been on stand by since October 2009. I do have an excuse though: We have been way too busy fulfilling the needs of our customers here and in Denmark to even  begin writing some stuff here. The Danish market for SEO has been extremely busy and it still is. Of course this is in the category “Positive problems” but still – it was’nt the plan that this blog should be all so quiet for such a long period of time.

Søgemaskineoptimering as search engine optimization is called in Danish is the marketing numero uno in a down economy! Thus there have been no spare time for us to maintain this place and start giving you guys some hint about this field of business.

As a result I’ll have to treat you with yet another translated article – this time about personalized search:

It has been an active week for Google – several new initiatives are launched, and one of them stands out from the rest: Personalized or customized search results. Personalized search – as it is called in English – is no new thing, but it has until now been the case that you only got personalized search results in Google when it was logged. This is no more! Now it all, which initially will have its search results influenced by past behavior. And there are consequences!

What is the personalized search results?

Google calls it the “web history” – what shall we call it in Danish? In essence this consists in that Google tracker which pages of search results you click on when you searched for something. Let’s say that you love to buy comics. Quite often you are looking for “comic” on Google, and very often you click into tegneseriesiden.dk. Google now learn that you have a preference for the site, when searching for comics, and you will find that tegneseriesiden.dk placed higher in search results. Often you will also find that there appears more results from tegneseriesiden.dk than it normally does.

Until today it has thus been in such a way that personalized search results were only active when you were logged into your Google account. But now it is always – and then also when you are not logged. It gives some questions and potential problems as I see it. Preserved – it’s possible to renounce this “service” but the fact is that it is a vanishingly small number of people who will ever hear about personalized search – and even fewer who will decide whether it is good or bad. At the end of this post I show you how you turn personalized search results. And you ask me, the answer is bell clear: turn it off!

In my eyes it is a big step back, Google introduced personalized search for all, whether logged in or not. Second, I believe that it removes a portion of the abundance and diversity, as an “independent and non-colored” engine to deliver – and secondly, I see a number of more professionally-related issues.

Does your librarian tech you new stuff?

Google is your librarian to rank every viewer and the network’s content for you. Let us again imagine that you have an ardent passion for comics. You turn up at the local library very frequently, and every time you ask the librarian if she has some good comics to offer. You get a different presentation, and when you have a weakness for Lucky Luke, grabs you always such a home. Are you with so much?

After a short time librarian has learned that you have something to do with Lucky Luke and cowboys, and as she shows you a larger and larger numbers of Lucky Luke and cowboy comics every time you ask her about the news from the world of comics. When she is recruited to only show you 10 comics every time there is not much room for new comics on something else a Lucky Luke and the wild life on the prairie. And hence, you lose a little of the diversity that you might have received some, if the librarian did not remember what you had borrowed lately.

Some will probably think it’s fine – and peace with it. The problem here is that you are not asked! Google just do it. Admittedly you can turn it off, but I am 100% sure that it is less than 1 in 1,000 ever hears about it, find out how to disable it or even think about it. It is not over just over a month ago, I had to explain a Copenhagen “SEO expert” that he had other search results when he was logged into Google, than when he was not

How should we explain to our clients about search results?

Let us forget the comics and take an old and classic example: Svend Bent sells coffee machines in his shop. Several times a day looking after his coffee machines on Google to check its own location – and especially to check what his competitors by devious tricks in the bag. Svend Bent clicks from search results into one or more of the competitors’ websites to check whether they have changed prices, and what he now checks otherwise. He clicks not caught on its own website from search results – it knows he is and knows what it contains.

It seems Google via the cookie they have dumped on Svend Bent’s computer, and would rapidly Svend Bent find that his competitors get better and better locations, while his own website rattles down the search results. He calls his SEO pusher and scolding – but just receive the message that he is still No. 2 in “coffee makers”. Svend Bent says he does not say is No. 2 but the No 9 Now SEO Pusher (unless the aforementioned “expert” from Copenhagen, Denmark) immediately ask Svend Bent to sign out of Google.