As Google launches real-time web and personal search, SEO professionals think it could be increasingly difficult to replace results above the fold due to less real estate availability. This is because the returns for search queries are not only skewered towards the preferences of each user, but the results have the potential to contain more spam than ever before. A simply constructed file, an authoritative landing page and a Twitter account is supposedly all it takes for spammers to get the upper hand; which means that the SEO industry may have to rely more heavily on PPC campaigns to produce consistent results, as the ability to produce authoritative organic results lessens.
Spammers
Until recently the Google algorithm dictated that a page had to have authority to convince Google that it wasn’t spam, but the difficulty with real time search is that fresh and topical content takes priority. This means that it is actually easier for spammers to produce favourable content now using a Twitter feed than it is for SEO specialists using ethical optimisation. For example, to take advantage of an albeit brief moment with a prominent first page listing a spammer need only upload a file and log into Twitter.
Real Time Search
The reality of the situation is that no matter what major search engines implement to filter results, spammers and hackers are always poised to try and take and take advantage of the new algorithms. The problem with incorporating Twitter to generate relevant real time search results is that the content is not crawled in the usual way; therefore Google cannot determine the quality or authority of the content the way it has done before. The repercussion of this is that results may contain inaccurate, low quality and irrelevant content. Regardless of this, Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products at Google, has faith in real time search, stating in an interview that she trusts it “most of the time” even if the results are not coming from friends in her social network.
SEO
She does admit however that although the PageRank algorithm cannot be applied to real time search, it is still possible to filter results using it to detect variances when monitoring the online ecosystem. It has been speculated that there can only be one outcome from this, organic results that are split by Twitter results. That means that there would be a greater fight on the average SEO company’s hands to appear either above or below those Twitter generated real time search results, which is why PPC may increase in popularity in an overall search engine marketing strategy.
Although the point of real time and personalised search is to generate the most relevant results for the user, it is possible that Google is just trying to cash in as much as possible from online marketing companies; either using the change to get SEO companies to spend more time and money on achieving natural results, or by simply encouraging them to use paid advertising instead. As for spam? It is thought that any dubious content that is generated because of the changes will be short lived, because at the end of the day, Google will only remain dominant if users continue to get the search results they want.
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Google might intentionally be ignoring all the spam methods for SEO purposes as it can get additional revenue from adwords when companies are forced to use it.
Another theory is that it wants more free content generated by people at the social sites that is the reason why it gives lot of importance to web 2.0 site’s content even though spammers can use them for SEO benefits.