Google now personalizes all search results based on search history and other factors. As a result, many are wondering if rankings still matter. Is this the death knell for SEO? Before complete surrender, it's important to understand exactly what personalized search is, then we can figure out what it means to SEO.

Google announced "personalized search for everyone" on its blog, with a video explaining how it works.

Danny Sullivan posted an in-depth analysis on Search Engine Land that is a must-read.

A strong sign that the SEO sky isn't falling is the low key nature of Google's announcement and the almost ho-hum response from the industry. Danny Sullivan reported a few days after the announcement that less than 50 news articles and blog posts were written about it according to Google News. In contrast, nearly 1,000 articles were written about a relatively minor change to Google’s First Click Free program.

It's been more than a month now, and it appears that SEO, rankings, traffic, and conversions have not been seriously affected by the change.

David Harry at SEO Dojo blogged on the change. His team ran tests on personalization:

"For starters it is worth noting that we looked at a small set of related informational queries; there is more testing to be done. That being said, here are a few initial findings:

• No two SERPs the same; of interest is that there was a constant state of flux and regardless of the searchers location (within the US) each set of results were unique.
• No SERP unrest; with the above in mind, there wasn’t massive movement. It was often more re-ranking of the top 10 results than having totally different sets of URLs in each.
• Top dogs; while there was movement, the top 3-4 results were often very consistent with minor re-rankings. The 5-10 positions were far more likely to have larger re-ranking anomalies.
• Personalization is a kitten; not a dragon. Another interesting finding is that personalization wasn’t having as much of an affect as many have felt it would. Yes, there was evidence of high levels of re-ranking, but the re-rankings with PS off weren’t greatly different from those with it turned on.

The important take-way here is that this is NOT a wholesale change of SERP results from one user to another. This will obviously vary on different query types, but from what we saw, it wasn’t the SEO killer that some have feared. It is a far more subtle change and we should not start professing that the game has changed."

Let us remember, [Google is] not saying that the way they calculate personalization has changed, merely the presentation (i.e., logged in/out makes no difference).

Even with "everyone" personalization, there will still be many searches where two or more people get identical results. As Danny Sullivan said, "Personalization isn’t so dramatic that everyone will see radically different stuff. Google doesn’t envision a future where [for instance] someone who’s conservative would get only conservative results while someone who’s liberal will get only liberal ones."

“We want diversity of results,” said Google product manager Johanna Wright. “This is something we talk about a lot internally and believe in. We want there to be variety of sources and opinions in the Google results. We want them in personalized search to be skewed to the user, but we don’t want that to mean the rest of the web is unavailable to them.”

In this new age of personalized search results, organic SEO remains the foundation for all online marketing, as Google's core index is still the foundation for all search results. Monitoring rankings has never been an exact science, but it has always presented a reasonable and valuable baseline for your online brand.

SEOmoz has an excellent post on the impact of this change on search results and SEO practices. We agree with their conclusion: established SEO best practices will still yield the best results. These include:

• Make pages accessible
• Focus on search keywords that your target visitors use
• Write fresh and valuable content for your target visitors
• Develop links with good sources

The fact that Google has implemented personalized search for everyone proves that rankings are as important as ever. Users are demanding a higher level of relevance and integrity in search results, which has in part fueled interest in Bing. Bottom line: If you have real value to deliver, optimizing your website for organic search is as important as ever.