Thanks to our smart SEO Team (Antonio Espinoza & Mike Turner), we gathered on Tuesday to talk about the latest Google updates and how they will affect SEO early this year.  Here are some great answers to the questions we had during the presentation and some basic information on each topic–enjoy!

Topics discussed:

• Google Caffeine Update
• Google’s Real Time Search
• Google Personalized Search Results

Google Caffeine

- Google is slowly rolling out this new algorithm and is currently using in one datacenter with wider usage this year.

- This particular algorithm indexes significantly more pages than the previous algorithm. This is important because the more pages Google indexes, the more competition you are going up against, meaning the more important to optimize your site to ensure that Google can crawl as many pages of your site as possible.

Real Time Search

- For certain searches that have enough social media content (It’s not yet known how many conversations trigger this) Google has started to show real time conversations about your business/keywords, often times above the organic listings. This is key because if you are not monitoring the conversations about your business/keywords you are missing a major opportunity to engage your prospects.

For example:

Google personalized Search Results

- Google has been customizing search results for some time now for those who are logged into with their Gmail accounts. Now, regardless of if you are logged in or not, Google will be serving up customized search results.

Here are some Frequently asked questions and answers that you may get from your prospects/clients:

Question: You say I’m ranked #3, but my computer says I’m ranked #7.  What’s going on?

Answer:  Are you logged in to your Google account?  If so, Google is remembering the links you click on and personalizing to what they think your preferences are.  If you are logged in, log out and try your search again. Here is a screenshot that shows what it looks like when you are logged in:

Question: I’m logged out, and it still is showing a different ranking than what you told me.

Answer:  Depending on what data center Google returns your results on, then there will be variations in search results.  Our server is based in Arizona, so we get results based around that.  If you’re in New York, your rankings are likely to be slightly different than ours.

Question: What if I’m logged out, and in the same data center as you, but still seeing different rankings?

Answer: Google has recently rolled out personalized results whether you are logged in or not.  Based on your search history, Google wants to provide more of what you are looking for naturally.

Google says that it does not always personalize searches, and you’ll know when they do, because there will be a button to the bottom-right of the search button that says, “View Customizations.” As shown in the below screen shot:

To get the same results do the following: You can always choose to disable the customization by either clicking “Web History” or “View Customizations”, and choosing the “disable” option.  After that, Google should not personalize your search results. Here is a screenshot of where the “Web History” button is located:

Final Question: I’m still worried about this Personalized Search.  What is this going to do to my site?

Answer: Google is constantly tweaking their algorithms, and we have the unique perspective of monitoring hundreds of SEO campaigns so that we can test what works and what doesn’t. Before the release of the Personalized Search feature on December 4^th, Google was already personalizing searches, as long as you were logged in to your Google account.

From our experience, we’ve seen that when searchers are competitively shopping, they will most likely not convert on the first site they see.  They will do research, and as long as you’re within the top ranks, you will be found, making it more of a necessity to optimize your site to show up as high as possible for keywords that mean leads and sales to your business!

-Webmarketing123’s SEO Team

Hope you all had a safe and happy new year! Welcome, 2010!