Previous Query refinement coming to natural results
Somehow managed to miss this when Danny Sullivan mentioned it a few days ago. But the rumour is Google is going to start personalising results based on the previous query. This is something that’s been going on in paid for many months, but I think the implications are much greater for natural search.
With personalised results a user has to be logged in and turn on their search history, for Google to produce results based on your previous searches. But this data is mainly used to disambiguate broad topics with some favour for sites that you commonly visit.
The ‘Previous Query’ feature will be the norm for everyone and will work on just the previous query. So a search for ’Paris’ then’ Holiday’ will return results as if you’d type in ‘Paris Holidays’. The implications for searches and search marketers are huge. For searches, results that stay on topic should be easier to come by, providing you’re not a topic switcher – though, it should be fairly easy to switch with a more specific query.
For SEO, there’s much greater opportunity for delivering more focussed traffic. Just need to understand user behaviour. Looking at related queries is a good starting point.
This is a really great move, which gets around some of the issues with a pure link based algorithms – using user data was inevitable.
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