This month Google announced that they would be designing everyone’s search results based on their search history even when users are not signed into Google, even though personalized results are nothing new in Google’s design of SERPs (search engine results pages). Google has been customizing peoples SERPs  for quite a while already, but until now it only happened when you searched while signed into your Google account. Today, signed in or not, everybody gets personal results.

Whether you’re signed in or not, all the searches you run on Google are stored in your browser cookies. This data is referred to as your ‘Web History’ and Google uses it to customize your search results. If you’re not signed in, your Web History is stored for 180 days, then old data is replaced with new searches. If you’re signed in, there’s no time limit and you can manage your Web History.

So the searches you run and sites you visit will affect your future search experience. The sites you visit more often will be pushed higher in the search results on related queries.

As an example if you search for ‘website design’ and visit www.webdesign.com, next time when you search for ‘website design’ you may see www.webdesign.com in top 10 results even if it doesn’t rank there in the general impersonalized search. You can tell that your search results have been personalized by the ‘View customization’ link in the upper right hand corner. 

The personalized search results can differ significantly from the general SERPs. I ran a couple of tests searching for related keywords and clicking the same site each time. The results can be drastic – imagine a site page that is ranked for web design at number 30, it might be pushed to a ranking of 5 even if your signed out of Google.

To check a site’s rankings use a rank checker to get a list of impersonalized rankings.

Meta Descriptions have also changed recently

Your Meta description is a crucial factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History. Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear high up in their personalized search results.

 Since everybody now gets personalized results, the scope of the effect your Meta descriptions have on your rankings can get really huge. That’s another reason why you should invest some time into testing and optimizing your Meta descriptions.

Google doesn’t always show the Meta description you provide. Sometimes it just compiles a random text snippet from your page that contains the keywords used in the query. But you can easily locate the keywords where your Meta description shows up by searching for them on Google.

There’s been a lot of criticism coming down on Google’s new design for introducing personal search to everybody. Some people are worried about privacy issues. Others don’t like it because this will help keep the small guy out of the game. And this makes SEO success harder to measure for search engine optimization firms.