This means that when you perform a web search you’ll see organic results combined with content that you and your friends may have shared. For example, if I searched for ‘fluffy bunny’, and a friend on Google+ had recently shared a picture entitled ‘fluffy bunny’, then it’s highly likely that this picture would appear in my search results above any other images or sites about fluffy bunnies.

The really off-putting thing about this is that it will look like the content personalised to you is available to the whole wide world in that familiar and unthreatening white-and-blue colour scheme. Luckily, this isn’t actually the case.

What Will Be Included?

Basically, SPYW takes a functionality that already exists in Google search – the ability to perform a social search – and blends it with the conventional Google search that millions of people use every day. Although this change has been in progress for a while, the immediate difference is that SPYW will be a heady combination of web search, personalised search and social search. All of these have been available before now, but only as separate entities.

So, SPYW will draw a variety of elements from Google’s channels into your search. These will include ‘pure’ organic listings as well as listings that are personalised by your previous activities – for instance, sites you’ve already visited which will be boosted in your personalised results. So far, so conventional. But now Google will be taking personalised search a stage further by including listings that have been boosted up the rankings by the activities of people in your social circles.

The really significant change, however, is that material that you have publicly or privately shared on Google+ will also become available in search results. Fortunately the private stuff will only appear in the results of you and the person you shared with, whereas the public material will be visible to anyone in your circles.

What Will Be Excluded?

Google doesn’t yet own the whole internet, so some of the big social media streams such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr still have terms of service that prevent them from sharing private information with Google. You can also choose to opt out of SPYW and just receive regular search results, and there will even be a handy button to let you switch between SPYW and the standard listings.

What’s the Big Deal?

I’ve already pondered the SEO industry’s obsession with rankings and whether increasingly personalised searches are making for increasingly irrelevant ranking results. Clearly what you and I see as search results can be completely different, but what other impact is this likely to have?

In terms of linkbuilding, this should be a massive boost to content-driven activity. We’ve known for a while that cheap links from spam sites are becoming ever more obsolete, but the renewed importance of social sharing is going to force companies into producing interesting, shareable content in order to put themselves at the top of personalised searches.

We’re also likely to see an increased focus on brand ambassadors. If you can’t rely on appearing at the top of the organic rankings, then it might be worth attaching your brand to someone highly influential in your niche. If they have thousands of followers on Google+ and you can persuade them to share your product or service, then you’re laughing.

Whenever Google makes a significant change it causes a re-think and a repositioning of the whole SEO industry, and a shift towards better content can’t be all bad. If your digital marketing strategy could do with a refresh, drop me an email at erjohnson@quba.co.uk or call a Quban on 0114 279 7779.