Google sparked a fire in the SEO blogosphere this month when they announced the combining of data from Google Personalized Search, Google Personalized Homepage, and Google Search History into a single personalized Google search experience.

This means that, when you’re signed into your Google account (using GMail, for example) , Google will serve you modified search results based on the search listings you’ve clicked in the past, as well as the widgets you have installed on your personalized homepage, pages you’ve bookmarked in Google Bookmarks , and other data sources.

What makes SEOs nervous (besides the ever-present and duly-justified paranoia that Google is watching everything we do online) is that it’s going to be increasingly difficult to say, "My site is #1 in Google for keyword [fill-in-the-blank]." That’s because pretty soon everyone’s going to be getting at least slightly different search results.

Perhaps even more worrisome for some SEOs is that they’ll no longer be able to base their pay-scale around the rankings they’re able to achieve for a client. It’s difficult to tell your client you placed them in spot #1 when their own personalized Google shows their site in spot #4.

Those are all legitimate concerns, of course. However, there’s not much point to getting too upset about them for a several reasons:

- First, Google has been doing this for a long time. People have been getting personalized search results from Google since June 2005 when the program was first rolled out. Most people haven’t noticed because changes have been subtle. So far, it hasn’t significantly effected the way any of us get traffic to our sites. The only thing that’s changed is that Google is increasing the number of data sources they’re pulling personalization info from.

- Second, most of us get slightly different results anyway, even without personalized search. That’s because Google’s search results are pulled from different data centers depending on where you are in the world, and most data centers have a unique copy of the Google index. Being in Hawaii we often see different results than our friends in California , Kansas and Boston .

- It’s time for SEO to become SEM (search engine marketing) and to stop basing compensations solely on rankings . After all, rankings are pointless without traffic that actually converts to paying customers . SEM is about getting the largest number of paying customers to a site, not about vanity-rankings intended to stroke egos.

- Finally, even if we all agreed that personalized search spelled the end of the professional SEO (which it doesn’t) , who would we complain to? Google’s dominant and rapidly increasing search market share means they are center stage under the big tent of search . It’s not like there’s any choice about whether or not to adapt to their system for serving up search results.

In the end, Google Personalized Search becomes just one more reason you should focus on writing the best title tags and compelling descriptions for your pages that you possibly can. After all, the pages with the titles and descriptions that users find most compelling are the ones that get the most clicks—and it’s these clicks that are the primary factor in influencing Google Personalized Search.

Google Makes More Link Data Available

Ever noticed how badly the link data provided by Google’s link command sucks? Yahoo gives us great data with Yahoo Site Explorer , but Google has long been too stingy and paranoid to give us any real info on who they see linking to our sites. Well, no more.

Google recently added a significant enhancement to Google Webmaster Central which allows users to view extensive data on their site’s incoming links. But not other people’s incoming links, mind you. You’ll need to verify that you own the site before you can access its data, so this feature is useless for analyzing your competitions’ backlink profile.

Still, it’s a significant step up from the miserly link counts Google used to provide, and we applaud them (slightly) for their efforts. Also, in related news, Google’s Webmaster Central is now officially out of beta and into their mainstream.

More from the Google Webmaster Central blog .

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