You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years.
-- Google would have to lose $13.7 million per year, based on Consumer Price Index, to match Charles Foster Kane's proposed burn rate

TechCrunch cited the HuoMah.com blog on picking up a new patent issued to Google. The patent’s abstract makes for a scintillating read:

A method includes receiving personalized content from a plurality of content sources. The personalized content is based on user input. The method further includes receiving a personalized advertisement based on user input, and creating a customized publication including the personalized content and the personalized advertisement.

Michael Arrington suggested this could be the harbinger of Google Magazine. Instead of being written and published by jaded New Yorkers, it would be written by whoever the reader liked reading, and published by Google with ads included as part of the copy.

(Any bets on how heavily this would be used for, ahem, adult content? Google is going to need to spend a lot on the myriad flesh-tone colors that exist. Time to buy stock in whatever company makes those printer inks, perhaps?)

"I also wonder how effective this patent would be if established magazines tried to allow users to customize content in a similar way – Google could step in and claim infringement. Their hope, of course, would be to license the patent and supply all the advertisements," said Arrington.

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Once again support engineer Maile Ohye offers some clear explanations

I still have reservations about personalized search. I appreciate the ability to turn your search history on and off as well as the ability to remove specific sites from your history or clear the whole thing. I doubt most people will ever know they can control their search history to any degree let alone be aware their searches are being stored.

Realize that Google would like to better understand whether you want to know about fishing or musical instruments when you type ‘bass’ and your search history will tell them which is more likely what you’re seeking. But I think personalization based on your past searches can lead to you seeing an ever shrinking corner of the web in search results.

Personalized search isn’t going anywhere and we need to understand the seo implications of personalization. As long as Google doesn’t rerank things too much I’m fine with the idea of personalization and see how it can deliver better results. I still wonder if there’s a danger with personalized search in keeping many people from expanding on their current knowledge.

The privacy issues with your search history should be of concern as well. Yes Google does give you the ability to turn that on and off, but your history will still reside on Google servers after you’ve paused things. They may not be tied to your email address, but having them all tied together through a common IP has been shown not to be a reliable source of maintaining your privacy.

Have a look at the video. If you understand how personalized search works you probably won’t find a lot new in it, but you might be interested to know Google’s public stance on privacy. If personalized search is just a term you’ve seen others talking about and if you’ve never seen your search history you should check out the video. Its a quick and clear explanation of what personalization’s all about and how it affects your privacy.

Whether I agree or disagree with Google’s stance I appreciate their willingness to be more transparent on the issues of both privacy and personalized search.

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NY Times ‘My Times’ Is Your Times

Cruciverbalists will still have to pay for the newest crossword puzzles, but classic editions of the famed crosswords may be found on the New York Times’ customizable start page called My Times.

A number of similar efforts to offer Web 2.0 styled start pages, with draggable content blocks and personalized content, have launched over the past couple of years. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft offer them, along with startups like Pageflakes, Netvibes, and Goowy among others.

None have the New York Times branding behind them. One section of My Times offers a look into what journalists at the Times recommend; a number of these journalists are already well known. Clicking on someone like David Pogue brings up a list of feeds he suggests; in his example, technology and Apple are a common theme.

My Times lead developer Kevin Prichard said at the First Look blog they have “substantially improved” the technology used in building the content widgets. Improvements listed include the addition of a crosswords widget, faster search, and a sliding font resizer to adjust the size of the text.

We figured out where Prichard and company received help. The crosswords widget is a Google widget, updated weekly. Prichard’s comment about improving the widget technology also hinted at expanding the content My Times readers could access online.

That might suggest broader access to Google’s widgets, some of which attract hundreds of thousands of users, like the Google Map, YouTube, and Wikipedia search widgets.

Granted, a lot of companies say they’re leading in this or that, but Facebook has statistics to back up its claims.  For example, there are “[o]ver 500 million searches per month,” according to Aditya Agarwal, a Facebook Tech Lead, who notes, “This makes us one of the top 20 search engines on the web in terms of number of searches.”

Agarwal also mentions “[a]pproximately 1 terabyte of in-memory data” and an “[a]verage search query time of less than 100ms.”  Not bad.

He goes on to speak about personalized search, as well – this guy hits on all the hot topics.  “Facebook search results are sorted by an approximation of social graph distance,” Agarwal writes.  “People closer to you in the graph – your friends and people in your networks – are likely to be more relevant to you and thus are ranked higher. . . .  Facebook search’s key differentiator is that search results are unique to every user because they are based on a[n] individual’s place in the social graph.”

As for what we should make of all this information, it could be an indicator of a new direction for Facebook – Agarwal does mention “big plans to improve Facebook search.”

Others, such as Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, have taken the post as a “Not So Subtle For Sale Sign.”

In any case, it seems that Facebook is a more powerful entity than many of us ever guessed.

Recently we’ve affirmed that we’re not averse to using some manual intervention. We purposefully avoid using the word “mechanical” in describing how we work in the New York Times article. There’s a lot of people thinking all the time about how to improve search. We want to think algorithmically and in a scalable, enhanced way.—Matt Cutts, You & A with Matt Cutts

Social media is about making these communities work for me. It’s our job to do this with Google, now it’s our job to do this with others. Viral marketing is about stylistically different communities. —Rand Fishkin, SEO, Meet SMM

Social media can work for B2B, even Digg. You’re not trying to relate to those audiences, that’s okay. You don’t have to feature it on your site. I’ve been on Digg many times and even if 0.01% of that traffic/those links is/are actually on target, you’ll still get enough traffic and sales from that. —Neil Patel, SEO, Meet SMM

Digg’s not my audience, but if these young techie males can enjoy this content, I can get the links I need to bring my content to the correct audience.—Todd Malicoat, SEO, Meet SMM

We’re more worried about developing stickiness now. Build out of content and functionality. Sites will become research bases. Content aggregations, comparison wizards, mashups will all be popular. . . . Personalization is the scalable way to do social search. —Gord Hotchkiss, Personalized Search: Fear or Not?

Is personalization the death of SEO? No, nothing will be. There will always be a need for people to present themselves well and there’s always gonna be people who don’t have time to do it themselves. —Matt Cutts, Personalized Search: Fear or Not?

When you’re at 10% share in the US, that’s the challenge. . . . We must “crack the code of engagement” There are lots of people even trying Live search. The thing we want to do is how to get them to stay with us. . . . There should be no confusion in terms of our entire destiny and ability to make headway in search—it depends on keeping pace with MSN as a portal. —Satya Nadella, Keynote Conversation with Satya Nadella

[Bid management software is] a foundation by which you’re enabled to do other things. . . . Bid management allows you to focus your attention on areas outside your campaign that are valuable and quickly react. A bid management system can look at the world holistically. It can predict what customers need just like Google, Yahoo and MSN do. —Chris Zaharias, Debate: Is Bid Management Dead?

Real search marketers look at search marketing outside of just a bid placement tool. They don’t just look at immediate return. A keyword is just as important as your television ad. . . . It needs human influence—industry, consumer and marketer. It’s not just math. You limit yourself & search marketing and it will go away if you think of it as “just a keyword” and “just a bid.” —Misty Locke, Debate: Is Bid Management Dead?

Buy tangential keywords carefully or not at all. . . . Search engine marketing works because of direct relevance. If you really want to do it, maybe you should go with contextual ads. —Ben Perry, Pump Up Your Paid Search

What’s your favorite tool of any type (external)?

Greg Boser: Mine used to be Project Mayhem, now we use internal tools

Todd Friesen: Some Firefox extensions: Search Status, and the Web developer toolbar which lets you see all your header tags, alt text & CSS through overlays.

Cameron Olthuis: Serph (their tool)–it’s like social media meta search, getting results from Google Blog search, Technorati, etc.

Jim Boykin: Our Top 10 Analysis Tool on We Build Pages—you can compare your site to the top 10 sites ranking for your keyword.

Todd Friesen: Also, Aaron’s SEO for Firefox. And Xenu Link Sleuth gives you a list of URLS that are broken, shows redirect issues.

Alex Bennert: Xenu can produce a report—go back to the interface to export the crawl.

Todd Friesen: You can also do a multithreaded crawl—you can crawl your competitors.

Christine Churchill: Excel for keywords (a variety of tools), Rex Swain’s tool

Todd Friesen: Sam Spade has a desktop version of Rex Swain’s.

Greg Boser: WebBug

Danny Sullivan: Groowe

Better Ways

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(via Barry Schwartz at SEL)

Next, a WMW thread mentions that Google AdSense has started testing a feature for you to choose which sites are allowed to publish ads using your AdSense code, specifically to be able to report “unauthorized sites that have displayed ads using your AdSense publisher ID within the last week.”

(via Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable.)

Finally, at the SMX session on personalized search, Matt Cutts stated that if you want to turn off personalized search, append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL. I believe he also suggested that someone could make a Firefox extension to include the parameter (and get a lot of links!).

Some one took him up on his advice. Joost de Valk created an Open Search plugin compatible with Firefox and IE that automatically adds the string to your query URL.

There’s your link, Joost!

(via Barry Schwartz at SEL)

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Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

The basic definition of personalized search is results are reordered based on what’s deemed to meet your personal preferences. Pages may move up or down or even out of the top 10 (usually 1 page leaves the top 10).

Personalization influencers

• iGoogle (personal homepage) content
• Google bookmarks
• Search history (clicks)—a noisy signal to be used on a large scale, but it’s not noisy for just one person
• Web history (visits)
• Inflates your opinion of Google: I’m #1 for my name! My stuff is tops! I rule.

Google is pushing web history.

And then there’s Yahoo. Their closest competitor in personalization features is MyWeb, which is about two years old. You can save pages to MyWeb. Old features included adding notes and blocking sites (Wikipedia be gone!). Yahoo collected information and could have used it. But they don’t.

Ask’s MyStuff has the ability to save info in folders. (He then gave an example of how to save something.) It’s a fundamental, rudimentary take—let’s reshape our results on what you’re clicking on.

Summary: Google is the only major search engine that’s doing it. Yahoo and Ask are harvesting some information but haven’t put it to use yet. Google is likely to be even more aggressive with personalization over time. Their reasons: it reduces spam (potentially) and delivers better results (potentially).

Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO, Enquiro
(Total side note: Gord was the first “famous person” I encountered at SMX, but I wasn’t brave enough to actually speak to him. I was too busy having a panic attack!)

His presentation’s on what SEO might look like with personalization world, and also what black hat might look like.

SEO pre-personalization revolved around keywords & algorithms (links, keywords, etc).

SEO personalization revolves around users: search history, web history, current tasks, social patterns. If personalization is in place, social search can be an offshoot of personalization. But it’s very difficult for a marketer to look at an individual users.

We think we’re gonna look at buckets of behavior that work around themes: themes around products or things. Long tail optimization becomes really interesting because it’s more personalized—and more important.

Universal results & personalization: personalization can drive a much more confident universal SERP. Gord loves that understanding user behavior will be vital to success. Knowing what people are looking for will be vital. User-centered development will take hold.

Black hat techniques in this area: your results depend on your past history. For optimizers, there is a green field in which they can play: emerging spaces that are new topics without web histories. Create “buzz sites” around new, budding content as an SEO tactic.

Moving up the funnel.

For SEOs, a lot of our optimization has been about moving up the conversion funnel. Personalization moves SEOs up the funnel. We’re more worried about developing stickiness now. Build out of content and functionality. Sites will become research bases. Content aggregations, comparison wizards, mashups will all be popular. Black hats: widgets and gadgets to push visits to site (not inherently black hat, but could be swung that way).

For every theme, we’ll see circles of importance. Handfuls of sites with specific content will emerge for each theme. These will be the first places where people will go when searching for things. These sites get the bulk of early funnel traffic. These will be inundated with offers of RSS content, etc. Black hat: scraping/aggregating content to look like an authority.

User intelligence will become really important. Click-stream-based user tools, engines will introduce tools on the paid side as well. Social bookmarking sites will be hot. Yahoo has del.icio.us; Google has . . . ? Personalization is the scalable way to do social search. There will be more use of profiles in SEO. Black hat: spyware/spam to track clicks. (Hijack?)

Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service
Hooray for personalized search. This is a really exciting time for unethical SEO tactics. Google guidelines say not to install special software to manipulate SERPs—now Google personalized search will do it for you. Tell your clients to sign in on all their computers and visit their sites while signed in: “Hey, we’re #2!”

There’s already a fear of uncertainty: different data centers and geotargeting already create SERPs with varying degrees of differences. Personalized SERPs add more uncertainty to this issue.

This forces your customers to become Google addicts, using all (and only) the Google services.

How is Google dumbing down the user? By teaching users they can use less sophisticated queries (“public library” instead of “boston public library”), they are actually teaching people to think less and trust Google more. People are then less likely to use other search engines.

How to fix some of the problems

• Stop hiding the fact that people are logged in
• Be clearer on the SERPs when a result is there because of personalized search and not a normal result. If they’re that much better then why not highlight them?
• Make it easier for people to turn off personalized search. Right now it’s so difficult.
• If you’re going to try to spam personalized search, social media is the best way to do it. That’s your best bet. They’ll bookmark or link to your site. If there are lots and lots of people bookmarking your sites, that’s probably a less noisy and more reliable signal that they’ll take into account.

Tim Mayer, VP of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

One of the big trends in search is understanding the user query better. There are several different ways of doing that. Personalization = understanding the user better. Also under this is query categorization and better understanding query intent.

The subtlety we’ve missed is in user connections.

Different techniques of search personalization

• Session-based. Looking at what a user is specifically using for. Disambiguate the query based on the clicks and query. The challenge is figuring out where sessions begin/end. When do you shift topics/themes?
• Interest-based personalization. Understand the interests of the user based on their own declared preferences or user behavior inside or outside of the search content. Challenge: users sometimes do searches outside their areas of interest/normal behavior (like client work!)

Impact of personalization on search results

Queries should get shorter. Current average is ~2.7 words. For example: library vs. boston library (quite spooky that he and Gray Wolf would think of almost identical examples).
More of the top ten should be relevant to the user assuming a strict intent is extrapolated from the query.

Impact on SEO

Since they’re doing a better job of matching the results that show up to queries, it behooves SEOs to create more relevant content. Give the search engine enough content per page to help it determine the topicality of that page.

Yahoo’s approach: social

Discovery: Yahoo’s users’ activity in social products (Flickr, Answers, del.icio.us upcoming) can help them discover content that is interesting to them and their community.

Recovery: social search applications can help you save, store and “refind” info that you have found and is important to you.

30-35% of searches are for opinion-based queries: best restaurant, cool lamps. If SEOs come in, these can yield borderline spam sometimes. (He shows an example of a top 10 result for “cool lamps” with, well, not cool lamps. Very normal lamps.)

Socially-influenced results: his friend tagged some cool lamps, he gets served with them. Her reputation is on the line with that link. There’s a social incentive for people to help and tag things appropriately.

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google

(SMX’s bios list his job title as “Software Engineer Guru.” Matt says he only agreed to speak if he didn’t have to use PowerPoint.)
The inherent idea behind personalization is better results. This is powerful because different people think about different things in different ways. Jane’s definition of “kiwi” is different than mine. (Here he gives a Monty Python example: remember the one scene where that one guy can see a knight waaaaay off in the distance riding toward him. He’s far away, still far away, still far away—aah! All the sudden he’s attacking you! Aah!)

Personalization should not be a surprise. It’s been coming for a long time (Danny mentioned how we’ve seen this predicted for years). If we know even a little bit of information because you’re willing to opt in, then we can give you better SERPs.

PageRank by itself takes links and says how important those links are and puts those votes in ranks and runs over and over again.

Everyone has different singular value compositions, etc. You get different PageRanks for pages for sports people and tech people and cat people. Then you can blend that. Personalization is a dense version of PageRank across the entire web.

Personally I think it’s handy. You can find old searches and find what clicks actually helped you.

Is personalization the death of SEO? No, nothing will be. There will always be a need for people to present themselves well and there’s always gonna be people who don’t have time to do it themselves. SEO won’t be the same, but it’s not such a huge change that you won’t recognize it.

For all those who think it’s too hard to turn off personalized search: add this parameter to any search &pws=0 (thanks to Ionut Alex Chitu for that one).

Personalizing news improved the click-through rate 40-50%. Greg Linden (of Findory) said that that seems too low. In his experiments, they were able to get 200% better click through. That’s cool. There’s obviously a lot of opportunity here.

Q&A

There’s a problem of always being logged in: mom’s looking for braeburns, dad’s looking for iPods (ie types of apples)

Matt: we break it into sessions. The results would probably still be better with personalized search, even if they were muddied by multiple users.

Tim: Safe search. Filter on/off

Matt: Don’t argue against data. If people hand you data, don’t not use it. Worst case, they’ll just go back to the baseline if personalization isn’t any better or is totally muddled.

I’m gonna call Matt out: &pws=0 still collects data (ie in your web history)

Matt: You can delete, turn off completely or suspend your web history.

Tim: There’s another clear way to opt out and that’s just not to use Google.

Matt (taking the jab well): Or different profiles.

Click-through rates for paid search results: will their clicks influence their organic results?

Matt: Not now. Web history is trying to provide a complete picture. He thinks it doesn’t influence organic results.

We’ve got a lot of great designers at Yahoo, so why is the Yahoo “Save to My Web” button so ugly?

Tim: If you don’t like the my web one, you might like del.icio.us better.

Danny (teasing): Is that a hint? Are you phasing it out? Oh, sorry, Matt—I would have used PicasaWeb & Google Bookmarks but… I don’t.

Tim: They’re not as good.

Do you incorporate any kind of Google Coop subscriptions in personalized search?

Matt: That’s a good question [which of course really means “I have to think for a second” or “that’s a good question—for you to ask someone else”], honestly I’m not 100% sure. I can imagine that happening. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that over time. If it improves the quality of results, we want to do it.

Supplemental pages & personalized search: is it possible to use personalized search to find supplemental pages that are hard to find in main index?

Matt: You could, but it would be a little tricky because you’re trying to bootstrap. We call it “huffing your own signal” [does it kill brain cells?]. If a page never gets hit, it’s not as helpful.

Follow up: I ask because every time I get into an argument with a peer, I go to your blog to quote you, and a lot of the pages on your blog are supplemental.

Poll: How many are afraid of personalized search? A few. How many opted out? Many. Some were like “okay.”

Danny: What if Ask were doing it? Would it be icky if Ask were doing it?

We hear a lot about the importance of diversity in search results, listing pages from lots of different sites. Might personalized search hinder that?

Matt: The simplest example of that is the current 2 results from each site (called host/site crowding). I think we were the first major search engine to do this. Right after we brought it out, a VC emailed me raving about it. Without it, you’d have all kinds of crap from Geocities or Tripod. You can also think about genres. We need information, blogs, reviews—a good thing all together. It can be complimentary to personal results. Within this genre, what’s the best site for their interests? There’s still a wall for that. By and large, there’s opposition but they can work together.

del.icio.us has a diverse audience that’s actively tagging. Is it influencing SERPs?

Tim: We use signals from those pages to increase diversity. Rather than just getting signals from you, we’re getting signals from other users who like similar things.

Follow up: Yahoo owns a lot of thematic verticals. Are you going to use that data in SERPs?

Tim: There’s an opportunity for that, but it’s important to give the users what they want & the best results.

How deeply does Google try to guess at or identify the demographic of the user? (gender profiling)

Matt: In my experience, no. You don’t have to provide demographic information to register. Geographic information can make a big difference. Historically, Google hasn’t tried to collect or guess demographic data. I think I saw an MSN paper on trying to guess the age/gender of surfer.

Tim: To clarify that, since Google started as search, and Yahoo started as a media company, we collect different kinds of info. Hotjobs for example required that information to register. They may be useful to search.

Gord: This is marking a new generation for search on marking new signals on query-based intent. We don’t want the organic results and sponsored ads to be too far out of sync: expect the sponsored answer soon. There’s totally arbitrary host crowding.

Personalization impacts familiar territory. But they’ll leverage this however they can to improve search. There’s a lot of room to develop there. It’ll fuel a lot of innovations behind the interface and within the interface itself. If you’re worried about opting in out, you’re an anomaly. We have to think about regular users.

Matt: About 10% of queries are misspelled. If you could guess grade level, age, etc. from those mistakes, if you can find out what kind of a searcher somebody is, you can return better SERPs.

Have you done any eyetracking studies relative to personalized versus nonpersonalized SERPs?

Gord: It’s funny you’ve mentioned that, I was just thinking that. It’s tough because personalization is so individualized, that it’s very tough to mock up. It would be fascinating. If you combine personalization with those results.

Is &pws=0 a one off parameter? What happened to “turn off personalized search”?

Matt: There’s a funny story. We’re trying to simplify a mental model. Very few people actually care. When we have parameters at Google they can be sticky or not. I think it’s not sticky. If you’re checking a bunch of kw, I’d just log out.

I’m upset that there’s no transparency with personalized search. A second issue: I’m lazy user. Most people in search know spell checks work so well that you don’t care about spelling. I know the speller works.

Matt: We think overall it’s better. If you’re not signed in, it’s not personalized.

Gord: On a user basis, how many of you people think personalization will bring better SERPs? A few. How many excited to be able to target ads more effectively? Some. People won’t opt in to get better ads. People will opt in to better SERPs. When you look at opting in on a user basis, think on those lines. They’ll catch up like Marissa [Meyer of Google has] said.

Danny: They’ve long been saying, “We’re gonna personalize everything we can.”

See also: Gord Hotchkiss’s take on the reception of his presentation.

Comments

Gord Hotchkiss made a few observations about personalization changing search. Personalization is an approach that Google wants people to embrace through its Web History service.

Gord thinks optimizing through personalization will be more about themes that keywords. Beneficial sites will work on understanding user behavior better to provide them more relevant results. Black hats will try to take advantage of emerging issues and create buzz sites that certain personalized searches will find.

Michael Gray pointed out something regarding Google. Although Google’s guidelines say one should not use software to increase a ranking, he thinks using Google’s Toolbar and its personalized search do that anyway.

Michael has a bit of an issue with Google. He thinks Google is using personalized search to create Google junkies of people subscribing to Google product after Google product to influence and enhance their searches.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo Search looked at the broader concepts of personalization, and talked about how Yahoo sees the concept. To them, social media is in some ways an offshoot of personalized search. However, there is the element of user trust that isn’t taken into account with that view.

“One of the big trends we see in search right now is understanding the user query better,” he said of Yahoo’s observations.

Tim also suggested that for SEO, one should be thinking about giving the search engines enough content to determine the topicality of the page. Socially influenced results are simply going to play a larger role in search, inspiring a need for better content as well.

Matt Cutts said personalization should not be a surprise to search observers, as it has been discussed for a long time now. Personalization will not be the death of SEO, either, as some believe.

If anything, he remarked, personalization changes the game a little bit.

Although Michael remarked that the Web History service is difficult to turn off in Google, Matt noted how the attribute [&pws=0] can be appended to any Google query (ex. http://www.google.com/search?q=guild+wars&pws=0) and personalized search will be off for it.

Google Says You Are In Charge

Personalized search is the key to freedom when it comes to using Google. The company’s Peter Fleischer, global policy counsel, said the search giant’s policy’s put the user in charge of what they share with the company.

His op-ed piece appeared in the Financial Times, where Fleischer discussed the function of personalized search, and the challenges in finding a middle ground with its services.

He discussed the concept of context as it applies to how people search. Fleischer cited the example of searching for Paris; one searcher may searching for a romantic European getaway, while another could be looking for love life gossip about a certain hotel fortune heiress.

The more personalization people permit Google to have, the greater relevance their search results will have for those users. That’s where the quandary takes place, according to him:

The question is how do we deal with this challenge? Stop all progress on personalized search or give people a choice? We believe that the responsible way to handle this privacy issue is to ask users if they want to opt in to the service. That is why Google requires people to open an account and turn on their personalized search functionality.

Though people can turn personalized search off and on as desired, the option to do so is what has been questioned: Why should Google keep data for any reason? Fleischer said there is so much information coming online each day, “more targeted and personal results can really add to people’s quality of life.”

In other words, better living through Google.

As soon as webmasters voiced concerns about whether personalized search would affect the Webmasters, the team responded with "a resounding NO! For the webmaster, it allows niche markets that collide on the same search terms to disambiguate themselves based on individual user preferences, and this really presents a tremendous opportunity for visibility. Also, to put things in perspective, search engines have been moving towards some degree of personalization for years; for example, providing country/language specific results is already a form of personalization, just at a coarser granularity. Making it more fine-grained is the logical next step, and helps level the playing field for smaller niche websites which now have a chance to rank well for users that want their content the most."

When Webmasters asked the reps about moving from one domain to the other while also taking along your credibility, the reps answered.

" For each page on domain X, have it 301-redirect to the corresponding page on Y. (How? Typically through .htaccess, but check with your hosting provider).

You might want to stagger the move, and redirect sub-sections of your site over time. This gives you the chance to keep an eye on the effects, and also gives search engines’ crawl/indexing pipelines time to cover the space of redirected URLs.

http://www.google.com/webmasters is your friend. Keep an eye on it during the transition to make sure that the redirects are having the effect you want.

Give it time. How quickly the transition is reflected in the results depends on how quickly we recrawl your site and see those redirects, which depends on a lot of factors including the current reputation of your site’s pages.

-Don’t forget to update your Sitemap. (You are using Sitemaps, aren’t you?)

-If possible, don’t substantially change the content of your pages at the same time you make the move. Otherwise, it will be difficult to tell if ranking changes are due to the change of content or incorrectly implemented redirects."

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