Something interesting has popped up in the search results. A SearchWiki that enables searchers to move their favorite result to the top, or have them deleted/moved down in the SERP for that particular keyword search. It seems to be a good tool, especially for people who search for their results rather than using social bookmarking, or other bookmarking ideas.
SearchWiki was launched the previous month, and lots of speculations and rumors were doing their rounds in various blogs and forums. Personally, we are interested if this will have any implications on the rankings front. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is. For instance, if a large number of people are bumping up websites from the third or fourth page to the top, Google can easily determine and categorize these as authentic websites.
Now, this is something that will indeed help websites with quality content, tools, and services. We just hope Google has a way of determining spam with this latest tool.
Should there be concerns that the SearchWiki's will impact SEO? That all depends on how many people actually decide to customize their SERPs. It would be certainly cumbersome to customize the results for every keyword search we do.
For the time being we suggest to just optimize as usual. SEO can and will improve search engine rankings and traffic.