Google Homepage Skins - Change of Note for SEOs

I just had the official walk-through of Google's recent announcement for personalized home pages. In a nutshell, they are allowing users the opportunity to skin their home page with one of six different themes. The goal, and I quote, is to "delight users". And they don't just want to delight them in the short term. They want this to be a long-lasting love affair with the Google home page.

Actually, in the call, we got sidetracked a little bit with something that, to me, was far more interesting. I'll get to that in a second but first of all let's look at the noteworthy aspects of Google's announcement. The theory here is that the more you can personalize your home page, the more likely you are to interact with it on an ongoing basis. And if there's a certain amount of cool involved, it will hopefully keep you coming back. Of course, Google wants this implementation to be technically clean so they've approached it with their typical engineering anal-retentiveness.

One feature that is pretty cool about the new themes is that they are location sensitive. When you load a new theme the first thing you'll be asked to do is enter your zip code (right now this release is only aimed at the US, but a release for Google's other localization areas should come in the near future. I did add one in Canada, but I'm not sure if it's updating itself). After that, you'll find your seeing updates itself reflect the time of day and, in some cases, the season and your local weather.

Here are some examples. In Bus Stop, the weather impacting the bystanders changes based on what you might be seeing your window.

Let's further explore the implications. In these areas of interest, what gets included in the default content set under a possible "add a tab" category might have a significant advantage for any searches that fall within that content area. The more people who leave the Feeling Lucky? check box checked, the more people that will have these default content providers represented on the homepage, which will in turn likely impact their personalized search results. As we start exploring personalized search more and more, we're starting to see the possible tactics that are emerging for gaining visibility on a personalized search page.

So what's the bottom line here? Google's new themes are cute and will likely lead to a higher degree of usage, but they have little impact on the world of search marketing. However, the "Add a Tab" functionality could potentially have a lot more impact.

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