SEO Tycoon

**juliensimon** · 11-28-2008, 11:56 AM

Rankings is not the main factor when it comes to judge an proper SEO. Conversion is. It's not new, but it will become more and more true.

Personal search will be customizable and therefore hurt traditional SEO.

Read and listen to why rankings are dead.

It's gonna take more creativity and adaptation to new factors to be successful.
Bruce said it would be a big win for Google and the users.
The losers will be spammers and some SEO "experts".

your thoughts?

**vangogh** · 11-28-2008, 12:16 PM

I don't think that rankings are useless or dead necessarily. It's more a case that people see rank as an end goal when it's really just one part of the whole process. For example if search traffic for a particular phrase leads to 4 out of 10 people converting on my site I'd want to get as much traffic through that phrase as possible. If my page ranks on the 3rd page of search results I'd want to improve it's rank so it moved up to the first page.

Personalization and Universal Search do change the nature of rankings though in that you and I might not be seeing the same search results to the same query. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to improve where your page comes up in search results, but it does mean that the game itself has changed in how you do it and in the results you'll end up seeing.

In the end you shouldn't be focused on rank over everything else. Ultimately you're concerned with people taking an action on your page or site. Driving traffic to a page that doesn't convert makes no sense, but neither does having a page that converts 100% that gets no traffic. A higher ranking generally means more traffic from the search results page, but there are other factors. Ranking well for a phrase may or may not be important based on the phrase and your landing page. And ranking itself is changing due to personalization and universal search.

**VirtuosiMedia** · 12:25 PM

I don't think ranking on search engines will be dead for quite a long time yet. Intent and behavior based searches have quite a bit of growing up to do, technology-wise, and even then your good content or well-marketed content (things that good SEO's should be emphasizing right now anyways) will still rise to the top. The semantic web may help, but that's not very close on a widespread basis either.

Google's customizable personal search is nice, but it essentially amounts to a personal bookmarking feature and it seems a little redundant to me considering that I could already do that with Google Bookmarks or my browser. I probably won't use it very much and I kind of doubt that it will go mainstream by being used by the majority of Google users. I don't repeat most of my searches because they are very specific to what I want to do at the time and if I find a useful resource, I bookmark it.

I'm sure that Google will use aggregate data in some way, probably to help eliminate spammy or useless sites and to elevate others in the rankings, but in the end I think it will be only one of the eighty gillion unknown factors that make up Page Rank. It'll be a largely uncontrollable factor too as you have to have a Google account and be signed in to use it. You'd have to have a lot of accounts and it would take way too much time to manipulate the rankings in any appreciable way. Google operates on a scale that I think most of us have trouble grasping.

**chrishirst** · 11-28-2008, 12:27 PM

I suppose everybody will think it's a brand new idea now Bruce Clay has finally caught up with the real world!

January 2008 -> 5 Reasons Why Rankings Are A Poor Measure Of Success

October 2005 -> Rankings Alone Are Useless

**juliensimon** · 11-28-2008, 01:09 PM

the fact rankings alone is not sufficient is not a new idea. But Google Results being customizable kinda is.

I think this searchwiki is no big deal. But if it happens to go Web wide without needing to be signed on, then it might change the game, especially if they let the "manual personal rankings" affects their rankings.
Some people say that they won't because then you can trick their algo. Well, isn't what people already do? Hire people to rank hire, build more or less relevant links etc...

However, I don't think that people will use it much. As for me, I agree with Virtuosi Media, I don't think I'll use it much. However, I don't see it as a similar feature as favorite but as an anti favorite. If I use it, it will be to eliminate "spammy" results.

If it does something, it will be reducing non relevant traffic and possibly increasing conversion rate.

Anyway, got two phone calls in the middle of postings, I lost my thoughts.

**arudis** · 11-28-2008, 03:05 PM

I think it will get a little harder to rank higher because the users themselfs have a choice, but not that much because thats the overall point attracting users to your site and making them stick. So the users can pick them

**tchoppy** · 02-05-2009, 11:18 AM

Hi, what else can you go by if rankings are dead? My domain is PR3, and I thought that was a good way to judge how I am doing. It's a fairly new website so I don't know what my conversion is yet...but I guess that is another way to judge. I also heard that Alexa is a bad way to judge also, so is conversion the only gage?

**full house** · 02-05-2009, 08:33 PM

traffics don't give you sales, its the conversion do.

**itsjustmybaby** · 02-08-2009, 06:40 PM

If you receive lots of untargeted traffic, or no traffic at all, your sales will remain static.

**full house** · 02-08-2009, 08:12 PM

I need to agree on this. Even if you are in top position but don't get conversion its still use less.

**ThomasW** · 02-09-2009, 01:16 AM

Still rankings have effect on the sites popularity. It has still of great importance and can affect your sites traffic...