Google SearchWiki & SEO

About 10 days ago, Google formally launched SearchWiki, which is designed to make search results even more personalized. (As of this writing, we have not seen the SearchWiki features here in Singapore, even when searching on Google.com; but we expect that to change soon).

The official Google notification says this about SearchWiki:
"A way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. 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 is available to signed-in Google users."

The question that immediately crops up is: how will this affect search engine rankings? Well, at least for now, Google says that the changes will not affect rankings for others. "The changes you make only affect your own searches."

We would be naive to believe that all the user actions that will be captured with such a tool will not become a factor in actual search rankings at some point. We reckon it will be sooner rather than later.

Not just rankings, but boost clickthroughs too
With (the likelihood of) personalized search behaviour impacting rankings on the SERPs by the day, SEO professionals will have to expand their role significantly. The role of a SEO expert, until recently, was seen to be to help a website gain in the search rankings, with the assumption that as rankings went up, traffic would also grow automatically; however, as long as the rankings went up the job was done. The evolution of search algorithms mean that getting clickthroughs from the search results will become even more important; a conscious effort will have to be made to generate clickthroughs. The quality of titles of one's landing pages and the description that shows up on search results gain even more importance.