Google Preferences and SEO

You have stumbled upon a great article on a subject in which you’re interested, somewhere in some journal, deep in the recesses of the Internet. The next time you and your friends are hanging out discussing the mating rituals of aardvarks or whatever it is, you want to show them this wonderful article. You search for it on your friend’s computer but can’t remember the title, the author, what journal it was in, or how you found it in the first place.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find it again? The minds at Google must have had this experience because this is exactly what Preferences lets you do.

When users are signed into their Google accounts, they can enable Preferences, which saves search preferences and allows access to them from any device. Not only can they access their web histories, they can store other preferences, like language, number of results per page, and whether they want Instant results. Google’s aim is to make search more friendly and usable.

If you want to ensure your Preferences are intact from desktop to mobile, you’ll need to save your settings in your Google account. Your mobile and desktop settings may be different, and this way, you can go from device to device with ease.

This is convenient for users, but what does it mean for SEO? It emphasizes the user and returning quality results and relevant content, and that is exactly where the SEO industry has been trending. Preferences may benefit marketers because search results look the same whether you’re accessing them from a mobile or a desktop. If you’ve established strong rankings, this can help you keep them across devices and browsers. Brand authority can be strengthened for the same reasons.

Google’s announcement reads: “You asked, we listened—having the ability to save search settings in a way that provides a more consistent search experience was one of the top requests we heard from our users.” This is one step they are making to make search more consistent and user-friendly.