Bruce Clay (pioneer SEO) has predicted big changes to Google straight after xmas.

He says that with the new onset of personalized search even without being logged in to your Google account, that once the new algo kicks in properly, it will be more or less impossible to establish any kind of consistent, accurate rankings to report on, hence “Rankings are dead” etc.

Then like the next day Google lifted the lid on their latest tricks Searchwiki, see video.

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A crystal clear demonstration of just how personalized Google search is capable of getting, depending on how far they want to twist the dials, and importantly, impose it on the general public, rather than logged in Google users.

Their apparent testing seems to continue, with one SERP search last night showing us  our (same) blog post at positions #29, #39, #49, #59, #69, #79 and #89. …seriously, all at the same time.

That’s not normal, and this was Thursday night, not even waiting until the usual weekend index testing time. This morning we’ve also seen a change in the behaviour of the SERP from the usual double indented listing, to two different pages just listed (for example #1 and #2) but without the dropout indented listing that’s usually present, on ours or other sites.

We’ve said it before ourselves and will repeat that we also think there are big changes in technology bubbling under the hood of the beast currently, and that they are testing and twisting the dials.

Matt Cutts actually responded to Bruce saying that he didn’t think ranking was absolutely dead per se, but that things would start to head more that way with video and universal search playing a greater and greater part in things with time.

And apparently there still are people out there who don’t know that Google does image search yet? Our stats would suggest it’s as much as 40% image search at times, but maybe that’s just bloggers looking for good pictures for their latest blog posts.

As always, the only thing that’s certain is that there will be interesting times ahead.