Not even a week ago, Google introduced Personalized Search for Everyone in the Google search results. This is a huge deal for most of us Internet Marketers (and Google/AdSense Snipers), who are relying on Google to feed our websites with traffic through the organic search results. In this post I’ll try to summarize what this is, what it means for your rankings and why and how you should disable google web history.

What does Web History Means for My Rankings?

Before you had to be logged in on Google, to have your Web History affecting the search results, but now it is activated as a default. This means that if you search often on “Spanish Translation”, and always click on the same tool, this will effect the ranking of that website, and maybe next time you search on “Spanish Translation”, the website you always clicks on, will be moving up in the results.
So lets say you are optimizing your website for “Fast Spanish Translation”, and your site is number #2 on Google. You often make the search on Google to check that your website still is number #2, but you also click on your competitors to see if they made any changes their website, or what news they have. You never click on your own website, because you know what is on it. If you have Web History enable, this will now affect your competitors ranking, so your own site might move down in the search results, while your competitors will move up.
Because Google now puts this option ON as standard, this means that most people will not turn it off, and you have even less change of seeing how you actually are ranking in the SERP’s, when your customers are searching for your website or products.

Why Disable Web History?

There are a few reason to disable Web History, and if you own a website and want to check your rankings on Google, you should definitely turn it off right away. You can follow my step-by-step guide to disable it below.
If you work with SEO, got your own website or even managing your own website, it should be clear why you should turn it off; it WILL affect your rankings, so you should also make sure your SEO customers disable this, when checking their rankings in Google. If not, you will most likely end up getting a lot of calls from your customers, asking why they suddenly are moving down in the search results.

Even if you are not working with SEO or run a website, disabling the Web History will make your search results cleaner and you will see more “fresh” results, allowing sites you havent seen before to be in top of the search results too. Follow my step-by-step guide below to Disable Google Web History.

How To Disable Google Web History

To disable the Web History (so it won’t affect the SERP pages you see in Google), start by go making a search on Google, as you on the screenshot below. Make sure you are not logged into any Google application like Gmail, and you will now see a link to “Web History” in the top right corner. Simply click on the link.

You will now see a screen where you can disable the Web History. Simple click on “Disable customizations based on search activity” to disable your Web History.

If you see a screen like on the screenshot below, you have now disable your Web History, and your search results will no longer be affected by what you have clicked on in the past. Now you should only see “clean” SERP’s from Google.

I see this as a bad move from Google, but it is mainly in the light of working with SEO. It will now be harder to check your rankings, make your customer see their true rankings, and it is harder to predict if your will be on top of the search results for the visitors, as the SERP’s now will look much more different depending on which computer you search from. This will also be a big problem on public computers.

What do you think about the Google Personalized Web Results? Is it good or bad that Google now is “forcing” everybody to use it, and activates it as default? Most people searching on Google will probably never now about the Web History, and therefore never disable it. Feel free to throw a comment below the post.