Should You Tweak Your SEO Now That Google Personalises Search Results With Web History?

There’s been a lot of hype recently about Google’s Web History functionality. If you’re not sure what that is, I’ll try an explain:

As a “guest user” of Google (i.e. you’re not signed in with your Google Account credentials), all of the web searches you perform are logged, and stored for a period of 180 days. The click throughs that you make based on these searches to any given website will then affect how that website is placed in your personal SERP (search engine results page) for any related searches. Following the 180 days, old entries are displaced by newer searches you perform, providing a full rolling personalisation service. If however, you are signed in to your Google Account, your Web History is fully manageable and you can control what is included and what isn’t.

Oh, and you can turn Web History off via your Google account.

The jury is out on Web History – do we like it or do we not? Personally I’m not a big fan, I think it demeans my search experience by dictating what Google deems to be relevant to me. I like my SERPs clean and accurate.

Why should you tweak your SEO to accommodate Google Web History & Personalised Search Results?

Well, my theory is this; Web History make search more competitve.

Why? Because a click through to your site can significantly change the way you rank for the majority of non geeky web users who simply roll with what Google pushes out.

Google and Yahoo! have long stated that meta keywords and meta descriptions have no weight when it comes to determining your website ranking. Whilst this still holds true and meta keywords remain a lost cause, consider your meta descriptions.

Most of the time when we search for a term on Google, we’re presented with not only a link to the website, but also a snippet of the site’s content – the meta description. Sometimes Google won’t show this, at times it actually shows an excerpt from the website copy – here’s an example:

A search result showing our meta description

A search result showing an excerpt from our homepage content.

This is potentially the first thing that a user will see when he or she sees your company name or website URL for the first time. Given the potential value of a click through in terms of future rankings (when presented to that user), it’s important to get your description right.

If we assume that meta descriptions don’t affect rankings per se, we can also assume that we’re free to tweak this in to a more customer oriented, benefits driven paragraph – a paragraph aimed at gaining a click through from that user.

Of course, quality content and relevant backlinks are still as vital as ever, but little tweaks and changes like this can surely help your website gain some new traffic in the days of Google Personalised Search and Google Web History.

What do you think?