Personalised search has arrived whether you are logged into the big G or not.

Up until now all you’ve had to do is log out of and run your search.  Those a little more savvy have the excellent firefox plug-in from yoast that still give you a non-personalised search, meaning you should be able to see the listings for a search that everyone else will get.

Not any more!

Take a look at this screenshot -

That all looks ok, I’m at No. 1, but wait, what’s this -

So now we are seeing customised searches based on your previous search and you’ll see this whether ot not you are logged in.  All is not lost though, if you click the view customizations link and then “without these improvements” link you should actually see proper search listings.  Quite what this is about, or what google is up too only time will tell.  But now I can tell everyone I can get their site to position 1, all you have to do is find your site in the search, click it and then do the search again, and as if by magic, your site is no. 1.

The point is that if there is no competition and, more importantly, no-one searches for crowdedalliances therefore it is simple to rank for the term. Yet many website owners will go for such words.

What should be of concern is what searches are made that your website could fulfill, what those keywords are, and how your content reflects that. Otherwise you too could rank highly for crowdedalliances that returns no searches.

Why then do I receive so many pointless mass emails asking us to link to them in return for a very poor reciprocal link. Always on the look-out for something interesting, unusual and / or the worthwhile amongst the rubbish, I do look through them, even though the majority are rubbish.

So, what do I class as rubbish?

• Three ways with no relevancy.
• Links where the site is about 5 minutes old (or less).
• Mass mailed and have been picked up as spam.
• Links from sites I have linked to before only to see their link back vanish shortly after (oh yes I do keep a record).
• Any site that is either banned or not indexed.
• Link pages that have no link from the home page.
• Spelling errors that really should have been picked up.
• Anything from gmail, hotmail. yahoo etc etc.

Having said that I suppose at risk of another flood of link request emails I had better say what makes me give a link.

• email is from the site requesting the link
• a personal (not mass) message
• the site is relevant to my site
• my users may be interested
• the requesting site has some history
• listed in search engines
• the link has value to my site
• it’s written in such a way it’s hard to refuse
• a relevant site asking for a reciprocal link on a page with a higher pr than mine!
• all of the above

We have decided that this can be a frustrating problem for many website owners and so have introduced this offer to have your website checked over to see if there are problems that are affecting your visitor numbers. Things like can visitors find your site? If they find it can they get the information they want? What might be stopping them from visiting, staying or buying?

Looking at the latest Yahoo search results it would seem unlikely that it is over. There are several top listed pages that look far too dubious to be realistically placed. For one set of keywords this site has disappeared completely, while for others the links pages are appearing.

These updates seem to take longer and longer now. We’ll have to wait and see what the end results are.