Google's SearchWiki, Customized & Personalized Results at SMX West 09

First class of the day - Google's SearchWiki, Customized & Personalized Results. I was very excited about this class because I strongly believe that rankings are no longer a viable method of evaluating success for your clients. Who cares if they're ranking for "abc" if "abc" isn't sending them any traffic or if that traffic isn't converting? By the way, that's Danny Sullivan, the moderator for this class and Editor-in-Chief for Search Engine Land.

Now, with Google's Personalized Results, you can no longer count on Google results being consistent from one computer to the next.

Google confirmed that they are not using SearchWiki data to influence normal search results yet!

Also, Google started a new experiment using preferred sites. Now you can mark your preferred sites for different types of information which will influence how Google displays results.


Matt Cutts is sitting right behind me but I don't want to bother him by asking for a picture so I tried to take one on the sly but I'm sure that he caught me!

Okay, so three points to walk away with:

1. Convince clients that rankings don't matter.
2. Convince the partners to stop reporting to clients on rankings.
3. Have IMTs enroll in Google Experiments.