The thought of personalized results on Google has some SEOs squirming. Google’s personalized results feature has been around for quite some time now but with Matt pushing the personalization agenda harder these past few weeks, SEOs can’t help but take notice and wonder what the world would be like with multiple, personalized SERPs requirements looming in the horizon.

From a consulting standpoint where trophy rankings are desired more than actual traffic and conversions, the thought of having to ensure top rankings for multiple profiles is stupid a daunting task. While not entirely impossible, it does add another layer of complexity to this already bullshity profession. Forget that it’s taking more and more resources (time and hands) to scout for better quality links. Now SEO consultants have to worry about clients demanding top rankings for all types of results, personalized and otherwise.

Will traditional SEO die as more and more searchers go personal?

Without a reliable means of rank checking, traditional SEO loses its foundations for optimization decisions. They can’t tell who the leaders are. They’ve lost sight of the bellwethers. A bellwether is any entity in a given arena that serves to create or influence trends or to presage future happenings. Without a bellwether, for example, sheep might be left to wander aimlessly.

Without a reliable means of rank checking, traditional SEO also loses its metrics for determining its success or failure regarding changes made for the sake of optimization. Traditional SEO is a process the methodology of which is predominantly trial and error.

Without a means to determine what to adjust or whether to adjust your tactics and strategy, this methodology is dead in the water. With widespread personalization on the rise, traditional SEO can be aptly characterized as a dead man walking.

I sincerely hope that it dies, traditional, trophy rankings based SEO that is. It’s about time SEOs move away from trophy rankings and trophy keywords and start educating clients on the stuff that really matters: traffic and conversions.

Forget the rumor that the shift towards personalization is really about boosting AdWords revenues (that has been blamed for all major SERP shifts). This imminent shift might be good for Google’s quest for search quality, but for us SEOs, it’s good because it may signal the next SEO renaissance.

Matt Cutts: I think the SEO’s that adapt well to change an optimized for users are going to be in relatively good shape, because they’re trying to produce sites that are really pleasing and helpful to users. It’s definitely the case that if all you care about is an algorithm than the situation grows more complicated for you with personalization. But it’s also an opportunity for people to take a fresh look at how they do SEO. So give you a quick example: we always say, don’t just chase after a trophy phrase. There are so many people who think if I ranked number one for my trophy phase I win and my life will be good. When, in fact, numerous people demonstrated that if you chase after the long tail and make a good site that can match many many different user’s queries you might end up with more traffic than if you had that trophy phrase. So already the smart SEO, looking down the road, knows that it’s not just the head of the tail, it’s the long part of the tail and with personalization and the changes in how SEO will work, it will just push people further along the spectrum, towards looking at “it’s not just looking at a number one result for one query, how do we make it across a lot of queries. What value do I deliver? Am I looking at my server logs to find queries that I should be targeting? And not just search engines, how do I target different parts of the search engine? Like the local part of Google, the maps part of Google. How do I target Google notebook and the other properties and how do I show up well across the entire portfolio of search properties?” And that’s a healthy transition period that will push people towards delivering better value for their users and that’s better for everybody.

Amen.