Online Money Make marketers who use SEO for better SERPs would feel headache after Google has announced SearchWiki, which is a new set of functionality that users with Google accounts can use to customize their results on any given search.
SearchWiki allows users to move specific results up or down in rankings so that they appear in the preferred order when the same search is done in the future. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future.
SearchWiki also allows you to post comments on results, such as notes to yourself, but you can also see what other people have said about them as well. In addition, you can add and remove sites to your liking.
Please be noted that SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.
Please also be noted that the changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.
Google makes it a point to mention that this will in know way impact rankings when other users do searches, so before anybody gets all worked up, don't worry about that. But, this certainly does play into the personalized search scenario that can affect how those with Google accounts see search results. It seems that if they have already set a number of results to their liking, they are less likely to see results that would otherwise appear toward the top.
Naturally, this feature has implications for both search engine optimization and user experience, hence to the online money make marketers.
Plenty of users have adopted the behavior of using Google as a launcher of sorts, so allowing those users to customize their search results for individual effectiveness entrenches Google even more firmly within those users' web workflow.
On the SEO side, before, optimizing content for display in search engine results has tended to be thought of in terms of anticipating the behavior of the algorithm first, and then trying to anticipate the behavior of the user. With this change, the user experience becomes more prominent, and the SEO must think harder about motivating the user not only to determine content relevant enough to click, but now the goal is to motivate the user to rank the content higher in a given result set. Ultimately, this bodes well for the user.
