Kingish.com It's a way of life

With the relentless drive towards personalised search comes panic in the SEO/SEM world. Everyone is trying desperately to understand just how this might effect the rankings for their sites.

Here's a quote from Danny Sullivan:

From talking with Google -- and from my own experiences -- personalized search reshapes your results primarily by noting the types of sites you select from the search results. That allows Google to look at those sites and then give them a boost in the rankings, especially if you visit them often. In addition, Google can determine sites and pages that seem related to those you are already visiting, in order to give them a boost.

Beyond your search history, Google also looks at the content on your Google Personalized Homepage - what gadgets you have there, feeds you are reading and so on -- in order to shape your personalized search results. This is a new signal they've just started to use. Another new signal is Google Bookmarks. Pages you save in these also influence the results.

The fact is that this will increasingly mean that no two people will see exactly the same SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Your results will be being tailored specifically to you. That means that the traditional concepts of top-ten results and 1st place rankings mean little to nothing any longer.

I wonder whether there may be nice side-effect of the change for site owners. If sites that you visit, or have bookmarked etc., are given a higher priority, could it be that we'll start seeing an increase in returning visitors? It seens to me that this will probide a sort of positive reinforcement loop, where sites you like are placed higher in the results, meaning that you will visit them more, which means that they'll be placed higher in the results, which means...