IMPORTANT! READ THIS: Google just screwed your ranking reports

[Jeremy]

We are going to tackle this thread in depth on the radio show with Michael in about an hour. If you miss the show, you can listen to the podcast.

[Ridge]

Hey guys, you can find the podcast here (hate the url btw) but Michael covered a ton of interesting info in regards to Personalized search and live search which is coming into play now.

Poker SEO Podcast

Also huge thanks to Michael for coming on, truly amazing info he is giving us!

[KevinMcC]

Agreed he's awesome, thanks for the show guys

[Mark]

I hope you're joking. Please tell me you're joking.

It's sort of a joke but more of a hypothesis.

Mark

[Michael Martinez]

It's sort of a joke but more of a hypothesis.

Mark

I would not want to test any hypothesis dealing with click manipulation on Google's SERPs right now.

If it works, Google will eventually figure out how to detect it and probably penalize sites relying on it.

If it doesn't work, that may be because Google detects the activity and penalizes the sites relying on it.

If it doesn't work simply because Google doesn't care about the clicks for general rankings, then you're wasting time and money.

So to me the risk-to-benefit ratio is rather high. I realize in a highly competitive vertical it's more challenging to obtain better rankings, but usually you can still find new long tail queries to pursue where you don't have to take on so much risk to obtain new traffic.

Some of those long tail queries turn into gold mine opportunities for traffic as searchers come to rely upon them.

[kingstyle]

Really very useful informations for all thanks for sharing

[Mr-AJ]

Thanks for bumbing a 2 years old thread.

[aditd]

+1 would be even a better tool for personalized search.
So basically if you are new ... it will be harder to get on the first page.
So Google would be from: can search everything to ... search only what you want!
This although it might sound great ... it could end Google's supremacy.

[Michael Martinez]

Thanks for bumbing a 2 years old thread.

Ironically, some of the things we discussed in this thread 2 years ago (and on the Poker SEO radio show) may be more relevant today than then. Bill Slawski found a patent that Google filed for in March 2011 that deals with using SERP click-through behavior to derive quality signals for Websites. It's almost certain these signals are included in the signal set that the Panda algorithm uses.

I don't recall why, but I recently listened to Randy Layman's show where I was a guest and some of the issues that were raised about the future just sounded very eerily like what happened this year.