If you thought SEO was difficult now, you will be sad to know that things are only going to get more difficult…or will they? The introduction and proliferation of personalized search in Google will give users their own search results, but also make it impossible for SEOs to claim that they are ranking #1 for a particular keyword. But at the same time, having more than one #1 gives more web sites the opportunity to benefit from Google’s search traffic - which could be a awesome thing for savvy affiliate marketers.

In a recent (and very long) interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the Out of My Gord blog, Matt makes some insightful statements regarding the impact of personalized search on the SEO community. Since the interview is crazy-long, I figured I’d pull some choice quotes to give you the jist:

When asked about personalization being the nail in the coffin for shady SEO tactics:

I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the nail in the coffin, but it’s clearly a call to action, where there’s a fork in the road and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion, those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less. And so over time, I think, the balance of what to work on does shift toward working for the user, taking these white hat techniques and looking for the sites and changes you can implement that will be to the most benefit to your user.

On if highly competitive niches, like those that affiliates tend to operate in, will be harder to optimize with personalized search:

It is, however, also the case that in highly commercial or highly spammed areas, if you are able to return more relevant, more personalized results, it gets a little harder to optimize, because the obstacles are such that you’re trying to show up on a lot of different searches rather than just one set of search engine result pages

On why personalized search results, and not monolithic results, are a good thing for SEOs:

And so individual users are happier because theyre getting more relevant search results and yet its not a winner take all mentality for SEOs anymore. You can be the number one ranking set of results for your niche, whether it be a certain demographic or a certain locality, or something like that. And I think thats healthier overall, rather than having just a few people that are doing very well, you end up with a lot more SEO, and a lot more users who are happy and thats softens the effect quite a bit.

Interesting stuff, eh? From my point of view, I welcome the introduction of personal search, mainly because I am confidant of our web site, and the content that can be found in it. But if I was optimizing a fairly thin site that lacks substance and doesn’t add any real value, I would be a bit more worried.

I think the bigger question is if personalized search will make life better or make life worse for savvy affiliate marketers. I think it will make things better, but what do you think?

[Extra: Read up on why personalized search results might be relying on Google Bookmarks to personalize your searches.]