There has been quite a lot of buzz generated from the latest Google update, most of it bad, but some good.  Actually, surprisingly, quite a lot of people noted that they received a boost in traffic around the beginning of January, which was likely caused from the rollout of the new algorithm update.

I too received a nice boost in SERP rankings and traffic, but unfortunately my adsense earnings have dropped 50%.  This has happened to a few people I know and we are all scratching our heads trying to figure out why this has happened, I will write a more detailed post on it when I find more information about this.

Anyway, back to the update.  The biggest change, and what a lot of people hate, are these 2 new little buttons that crop up on the right side of your search results page in Google.

These 2 buttons allow you to show and hide ‘personal results’.  Now I know what you are asking….

What are personal results?

Taken from the Google Blog –

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;

And goes more to say –

Personal Results
Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations? Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are often so much more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web. With your world in search, you can find:

• Google+ posts. You can find relevant Google+ posts from friends talking about an amazing trip they just took, whether they’ve shared privately with you or publicly. You’ll find links shared by your friends, such as activities, restaurants and other things they enjoyed on their trip.

And here’s some crappy video –

What does all this mean?

Basically it means Google is no longer the altruistic, unbiased search engine we all love, instead it’s forcing us to integrate with another shitty social platform.  Facebook and Twitter are bad enough and take up too much of peoples time, are we really expected to throw pointless hours into grooming our social profile for another site just because Google didn’t think of something first and is way behind Facebook.

Google now priorities it’s own content over it’s rivals, lets see this in a real life example, say if we type in some terms like ‘Music’, ‘Cooking’, ‘Film’ into Google, what results do we now see?

That’s right, as you can see, on the right of the page we now see ‘People and Pages on Google+’.  Google+ profiles of relevant profiles (celebrities, public figures etc) that are related to the search term.

Nowhere do we see a twitter or facebook profile on the page.  This seems lightly biased to me, seeing as pretty much every celebrity or person worth following for such terms is already using twitter and/or facebook.  And a lot of the time the celebrities themselves are using Facebook or Twitter more than their Google+ profile.

Take Ricky Gervais’ Twitter Profile, it’s worth a daily read for shits and giggles as he’s always updating it throughout the day.  Now let’s have a look for him on Google+…oh wait, that’s right, he’s not even on there (I searched and couldn’t find him, I could be wrong).

It seems if you have not created a Google+ account you will not be listed in the Google+ results on the right side of the page.  Again, seems a bit biased to me.

It’s not the most amazing example I know.  But it just shows that Google isn’t treating its users fairly anymore.  It’s shoving its own platform in our faces when there are already plenty of other results that will do us just fine.

I have turned off the personal results because of this.

Things Are More Relevant Now

3 images should sum it up –

What Do Personalised Results Mean For SEO?

I guess the question now is ‘Does Google+ affect rankings?’.   Be sure to check out my new case study as I see how Google+ will affect my rankings, it will go live in a week or 2.