The challenge is that as the popularity of personalization grows so will there likely be a diminishing effect on your ranking reports. In simple, it means that 4 people in the same household could all be taking turns using the very same computer and doing searches for the very same keyword phrase, and yet each person would typically see completely different results because of their personal use of the Internet and a growing history of different interests.

What this means is that you no longer can tell exactly what your ranking reports mean because where you rank for one person will not be the same as where you rank for the next person or the next. Thus ranking reports could very well become meaningless in time.

The search engines attempt to serve up even more relevant content to that individual based on their personal interests.

Obviously if you are interested in your own products and you own industry, you site may come up in the top results when you search.But what is the rest of the world seeing? With personalization growing in popularity, there is no way you can use the traditional methods to know.

Personalization of Search may bring a new dimension of satisfaction by providing the user with much more personalized results. After all, everyone wants the best search results. However, it is bound to pose a few challenges for those who have never thought out what is really happening and the far reaching impact that it will have with posing certain challenges with respect to traditional search engine marketing. As I mentioned in part 1, there are solutions. But we feel that it’s important to help SEO students grasp the implications of how much things could possibly be affected.

Some will be quick to condemn ranking tools saying that ranking tools all seem to be broken and delivering up conflicting reports. Some might say, “I just won’t turn personalization on.” That solves it!