Unless you have been hiding under a rock or you have been making extra money in the stock market and got a fat bonus and retired to the Bahamas, as an SEO you might have heard about Google rolling out an algorithmic change based on personalized search.

There has been lots of articles around the topic, explaining how this algo update would work and what impact it would have on SERPs, but what does all this mean for us as SEOs?

For starters, we shouldn’t panic; personalization is likely going to only have an impact on rearranging top 10 results. In the post on Google Blog where the announcement was made, the example the engineers were giving was mainly based on CTRs (Click through rates) on a host(computer) level. Talking about it in simple terms, if your favourite hotel aggregator appears fourth for the query “hotels” and you keep clicking on that result disregarding the first three, during the next session is likely that Google will rearrange the results to show your apparently favourite site in the first spot.

So far, so good, if you were not in the top 5 for your selected query, personalization will have very little impact. You have a lot of work to do and the usual SEO work will need to be done to get to that privileged position.

If you are in the top 5 positions then things start to get interesting. Firstly, brand awareness will have a significant impact on CTRs. If your brand is well known, people will be more likely to click on your result and therefore the cookie hosted in the user computer will track those clicks and apply that data in the future. Marketing channels that seemed bound to die could be very useful to improve brand awareness and therefore CTR. There has been a lot of debate about the impact of display on branded and unbranded search, and ways to improve brand recognition, Social Media, display advertising, offline, etc, might now have more impact on results that they ever did.

Is that fair? Probably, not. Not only big brands have already been benefited by the Vince algorithm , but also they have deeper pockets and can engage in all these channels and reach more people. Not trying to be cynical here, but Google changes on the way they lay out paid ads or the way they consistently shrug off doubtful link profiles for big brands, makes me think that the companies that spend the most on Paid Search will benefit from more reach and more impact. I don’t imply that Google in particular, and search engines in general, will be purposefully biasing results towards big brands, but the algorithmic changes benefit big brands more on the whole.

I am getting off the point though. What I believe is going to be important now, is CTRs on organic results. In the past, when personalization wasn’t kicking in, search engines couldn’t use that data for the algorithm because it could have been easily spammable by click bots, but narrowing the dataset down on a host level (data tracked by the cookie), CTR suddenly gets at the top of your priorities.

This means that SEOs are going to need to work much more on how they present the results snippets to the audience. Titles and descriptions will need to become more compelling and stand out some way. Big brands might not want to experiment with it (at the end of the day, people tend to click more on their results) but not so big brands might try to play with ways to encourage clicking. I wouldn’t rule out SEOs testing the use of capitals in title tags, or special characters not seen too often (^ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ § ¬ ° ± º ø þ) or more marketing copy like copy using words like offers, deals, free, etc. I don’t think this will make results more relevant, it will probably make snippets very spammy like, but again SEOs don’t make the rules, Search Engines do. Additionally, these new ways to write titles will take up useful real estate from the 68 characters blue link and will make obligatory to target only one primary keyword per title. Additionally, link building with rich anchor text will be even more important because keyword prominence and playing with phrase based optimization will become more difficult in a more reduced title tag space.

So to sum up, these are my takeaways on SEO for personalized search:

• Ranking within the top 5 will be key in order to take advantage of personalization triggers. SEOs will have to work harder & quicker.
• Vince algorithm will work in favour of big brands that will have already a competitive edge
• CTR on organic results will be crucial. Factors such as brand awareness, multi-channel reach (display, social media, paid search, off-line), and snippet multi-variate testing will have to be taken into account.
• Link building will become even more important. Firstly to get into the first top results and secondly to make up for the lack of content based SEO techniques.

What do you think?

As an SEO you read about Link Bait day in and day out. Everything very interesting but you can only digest a limited number of Link Bait definitions or top 10 lists examples as link bait. Don’t get me wrong, I am the first one to enjoy a top 10 list but I can count with the fingers of my amputated limb the times that I have linked to any.

For me, Link Bait real ideas are the ones that show some creativity. The economic issue is always there and probably is much easier to write a controversial post insulting someone to spark an argument or invent a story altogether, but what I enjoy as an Internet user, and I really link to, it is useful and funny stuff, most of the times in the shape of a video, software or funny web application.

So from that point of view there you have my favourite Link Bait attempts of all time:

• Compare the Meerkat . The Link Bait spin-off site par excellence. Alexander and his compare the meerkat site has reaped the benefits of a TV campaign too but it quickly went so viral that the spoof site has the same PageRank than Compare the Market but with 11 years less of existence. Fantastic, humorous, funny and effective…as well as useless. But that is not the point.
• Will it Blend. Video related link bait also in a additional site. There is a dilemma whether the subject or your link bait should be hosted in the main site or in a standalone microsite. Succesful attempts seem to point to the latter like these series of videos from Blendtec trying to use their blending machines to destroy all sorts of stuff. This started as a Youtube channel and has evolved to a microsite.
• Doodlebox. This is a great online tool, funny as hell and on topic. Hotels.com has created this online tool so you can scribble around with uploaded pictures and mess around with your friends facial hair or vision impairment levels . Appealing to the primary school student that is within all of us , Doodlebox is a funny way to spend a few minutes and share your “art” with your mates. Flash applications are not the most SEO friendly thing in the world but who cares when the result is so cool. We will have to see how that evolves in terms of links but it is certainly worth sharing.

My contribution is quite cool

• Twitter Grader. When you combine and up and rising start-up in every body’s mouths and a tool that rates “popularity” online the results in terms of buzz and links are bound to come. I am particularly fond of anything that Hubspot do as I find them to be a bunch of cool guys doing the marketing that makes me want to learn more about (as opposed to the kind of marketing that is based on deceiving people). I am not a marketer per se, I am an web developer in background and a SEO for trade, but tools like this make me more accepting of the idea of marketing.

What are your favourite Link bait examples?

Link analysis is one of the most important areas of search engines ranking algorithms. Although some international search engines are less sophisticated in the way they assess link relevance, there is no reason to believe that these engines, such as Baidu or Yandex, will apply similar more advanced link quality indicators as part or the usual improvement on information retrieval techniques, in a similar way that more developed search companies have evolved, mainly Google.

Relying on link quality indicators has the advantage for search engines to avoid the “noise” and improve results relevancy for specific queries. This is due to the complexity of manipulating a link profile, which can be done, but it is much more onerous and time consuming.

Multilingual Link Analysis Best Practice

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Resources

• Url of the page where the link is placed or to be place
• List of keywords that the site is targeting
• Google Toolbar to check page rank
• Several online tools that might help you in the analysis.

Steps (for each document / page )

1. Page Inspection
   
   • Title metatag (title of the page) . Review if the keywords are related to the site subject matter
   • Text surrounding the link. Search engines use a lot of semantic technology in their algorithm. That means that they are able to understand the relationship between themed keywords. That means that if the text surrounding the link has a little to do with the theme of the page linked that link will have less impact than conversely. Take a thorough look at the text around the link to spot semantic relationships
   • Check number of links on the page. The more links placed in a page the more diluted the page rank (the mark that Google gives to any page, it is easily checkable with Google Toolbar) will be.
   • Check the themes of the links. A page full of travel links will provide with better value to a travel site that an inventory of links of random topics (travel, gambling, sports, etc)
   • Link Location: is important. Ideal case scenario:
     • links headings, followed by relevant text.
     • links right at the start of paragraphs.
     • inks on a new line after the relevant paragraph.

Read the linking page content attentively.

Realistically speaking is difficult to force people to link to your page in these locations. Normally, links at the top of the page will me more prominent than at the bottom.

2. Anchor text Analysis

Anchor Text is the “Linked Text” Anchor text is the blue text that you click on, the actual words used to follow a hyperlink to another webpage.

Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another page can use to determine your page theme. Anchor Text is still the single most important factor after title page. Ensure that the anchor text of the link contains keywords relevant for the page linked and that are present either in the destination title page or the copy of the page. For multilingual sites this is even more important since the language used to link to specific pages will help determine the geographic location of the linked content. It is very helpful when several languages are used under the same domain in different folders or subdomains.

Example:

Link in a page: luxury holidays in Spain

Title of the destination page: Luxury Holidays

3. Page Analysis
   • Links pointing to the page. It can be measured by page rank of the page showed in the Google Toolbar. Internal pages tend to have low page rank 0 or 1 but that doesn’t mean the link is not giving value. Obviously, the higher, the better
   • Links pointing to the whole site. Page rank 4 or 5 for commercial sites should be ok.
   • Domain listing in Dmoz. Dmoz is the most reputable directory on the web. Links from Dmoz carry a huge importance. A site with a link from Dmoz will give more linking value.

The relative importance and visibility of a webpage can be measured by several factors. A link in a page with good indicators will carry more value.

Tips & Warnings

• Gambling or porn sites linking to the client’s site might harm it
• Any link, regardless of the quality requisites stated, gives some value. Exception showed in the previous point.
• Links are difficult to get. Don’t discard a link just because it is not perfect, it might give the client’s traffic.