I’ve been struggling for some time now with this issue, since privacy is such a delicate subject these days in the online world. There’s a lot of contradiction at the moment, sides are being taken, boundaries are drawn and crossed every day. But what does it all mean, and how does it affect SEO?

The privacy issue now has the world split in two. Those who are willing to give up their privacy “for the common good” and those who believe that private information should stay that way. And of course a lot of people in between. Up until some time ago, online privacy was something that you could choose to observe. Most websites would ask you before collecting information about you, or those that would simply do it were branded as felons - and most had a bad ending, and rightly so. While staying anonymous online was not easy, it was at least in some way controllable.

It all ended with the emergence of social networking – Facebook, Myspace, etc. People started signing up like crazy in these roller coasters of information, sharing pictures, addresses, birthdays and interests with anyone interested. US Government constant pushing for lowering the privacy boundaries of it’s citizens didn’t help, people considering normal to share all kind of info. Google leaped at the chance, and started to provide personalized services, personalized SERP’s and in the end, joined the entire web industry, in providing personalized adverts.

The end of the year saw the push of Google’s latest child – the opt-out personalization. It is a huge gamble for Google, as it breaks a lot of privacy laws in the EU and not only. It was the first moment Google saw a noticeable drop in market share, as this little advertised move was being criticized violently by webmasters all around the world => Bing started growing. The main issue with this opt-out personalization is the fact that Google will collect information about users regardless of them being logged in their Google accounts, and providing personalized SERP’s, as well as advertisement, based on the collected data. Trouble is, there’s no apparent way to get out of this – the process is not accessible to neophytes, and collects info regardless of the participant’s age – illegal in EU without express parental agreement.

Combined with the blatant security issues Facebook admits having, and the deliberate sharing of information with any of it’s partners, things started looking grim for privacy in the online world.

From a SEO standpoint, things are changed dramatically. Personalized SERP’s mean that rankings are not constant form user to user, and more direct access to user preferences will make the difference. Social networking just became more important, and the battle for CTR will make the difference. The first page results will be all scrambled, with sites competing not only for a better position, but also for a better description, to get users in.

There’s another issue though: a recent movement started rejecting these privacy invading actions. Facebook starts loosing active users for the first time since launch, Google is constantly loosing market share.

In my view, the battle for user’s privacy is just shaping up. Companies will continue to try to get a hold on as much info as they can, and for a while people might let them. Until they lose a job over something they’ve written years ago on their facebook account. Or until they lose business deal over something they posted on a blog …

Privacy will continue to be a delicate subject in the online world, and in our view keeping the private information private will be a good thing for SEO as well. Targeted advertisement, and targeted SERP’s will only provide the results people wanted or found interesting at one time in their lives. They need change, they need fresh results, they need new products and good offers on the services they use.