News Source: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com
Published: Jan 20, 2009 - 01:54 am
Story Found By: theGypsy 1587 Days ago
Category: Searching
SNIP - Preferred Sites is a new experimental feature for Google Search that lets you personalize the results by adding a list of sites you want to appear more often when you search. Based on your search history, Google suggests some frequently-visited sites, but you can add any other site.
4 Comments
Comments
Can It affect organic seo in future ?
Of course it could. Google could use any of the data at its disposal to affect rankings. Doesn’t mean they will, but it will be hard to know for sure.
Definitely - check the last sentences of the post (emphasis mine):Preferred Sites is an extension of Google SearchWiki, the feature that allowed you to make per-query changes. If the feature goes live to everyone, people will be able to pick a list of authoritative sites and influence all search results.Probably more on the reputation management end of SEO, but definitely within the realm of an SEO issue / opportunity...IF it takes off.
It really does depend on what Google chooses to do with the data that it compiles. There are a couple of fairly obvious ways that I can see this going - people being able to share their preferred sites with a friend or colleague. Librarians in a university might decide to do this, or indeed an entire department could do this. Secondly it wouldn’t be that difficult to create a preferred sites ’pack’ - if the Google profile included your profession or interests for example (easy enough to do) you could simply choose to subscribe to the set of results that most librarians chose, or the ’knitting pack’. Of course, this doesn’t obviate the need or use of SEO, but takes it to an entirely different level. I can see how it can be gamed as well, if enough people can be persuaded to create an account, pop in a preset list of preferred sites and go off and make another account. Though this can be countered by removing the recommendations from profiles that haven’t been used recently. Consequently the game continues!