Here’s an interesting little thing.
This button (fig. 1b) will move the result to the top of the page and add this orange marker
(fig. 1a) next to it so you can easily recognize it. The result(s) you promote will appear at the top whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.
Maybe it’s old, I haven’t seen it previously. Looks like one of those personalization of SERP features that allows you to manipulate your own returned search results.
At the moment it seems like you need a Google account to use the thing, which may be a sign that they’d like to use such signals to affect SERP outcome. Not to mention user demographics, behaviours and all that other track your movement stuff.
What I’d like to know is whether or not they will be taking such factors into account long term. If a lot of people continually push a result to the top, does this mean that it’s a great result, or does it just mean that some group of SEO’s have found a way to cut in and mimic a few natural behaviours? How many Google accounts do you have? 
Did this help? Do you agree? I value opinions, why not tell me what you think below!
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Mieszkania Poznan - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
January 21st, 2008 at 8:29 amI don’t think it will work in future. There’ll be hordes of people hired to manipulate serps
David Bradley - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
January 21st, 2008 at 5:01 pmI’ve got four Google accounts! Would that be enough to manipulate this should Google happen to integrate it into their algo? I doubt it very much. What about 40 accounts? Would 400 do it? 4000? I suspect that Google already thought of this. It could actually be applied more effectively in reverse. If a particular site gets a flood of favouriting then it may be that some blackhat SEO is trying to fiddle the SERPs and so Google might penalise that site. I doubt they’d even do that the though. The Google algo is a lot simpler than Gogle would like people to think that’s why the SERPs are in such a mess for almost every popular keyword.
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robwatts - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:51 amA mere 4 David?
I agree on the whole. It’s more a personalisation feature than anything else, yet given enough data from enough verticals you could see how this could be used subsequently.
There be a land grab out there me hearties, go get some!
robwatts - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:52 am@Mieszkania Poznan - but could they compete with a billion users, therein lies the question
David Bradley - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:57 amYeah, I think there could be room for manipulation. Not that I’d bother personally. It’s all about time RoI isn’t it in this game?
Just out of interest how many Gooooogle email accounts do you have? I have one for each of my main sites and my personal name, that’s all. I’ve got billions upon billions of addresses associated with ISPs, other webmail systems, domains etc etc. It was quite a pain until I started to pipe them all straight into one of the Google accounts…
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Mieszkania Poznan - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:01 amI hope they’ll do something. Algorithm used now has too many flows. G. always said that everything will be made by a program and they don’t do anything manually. Time for a change ?
Jayson - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
February 10th, 2008 at 6:43 pmYeah we’ve got somewhere around 20 Google accounts and I’m sure we’re not the only one. I haven’t checked out the feature yet but it seems like it’s something similar to
sproose. com - ? I’m sure you’re familiar with it, but this SE is pretty clean and the results aren’t too bad. This could be Google’s attempt to cover all the bases just in case users like the Sproose model.
geld lenen - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
February 14th, 2008 at 8:33 pmSmall change this really works. And all the heroes with those many accounts: Google sees it all, with only one click. Including correspondence, related sites etc.
David Bradley - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
February 14th, 2008 at 8:49 pmYes Geld, we know…
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Jayson - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
February 14th, 2008 at 8:58 pmHeroes? Not sure if that was a slam, but to clear things up, there are several good reasons why we have several email accounts… none of them are aimed at trying to mislead the Googler or become a hero. I can’t imagine anyone thinking Google didn’t have instant access to something they provide.
Colin Boyd - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
February 25th, 2008 at 11:45 pmI believe the jury is still out on this
Charles Wilson - Google Like it - Promote your site in your SERPs
March 13th, 2008 at 8:10 amI agree that such a move will affect ranking when blackhats starts to game it. Is Google adding human input into their otherwise fully automated indexing strategy?
Yahoo from what I understand tracks if a users returns from a results in Yahoo SERP. They use it as a guide to the relevance measure of the site to the searched keyword.