Hi folks, I appreciate all the ideas and insights you've shared on this topic. Trust me when I say I am well-versed in SEO, having had to incorporate it into running Psych Central for the past 15 years full-time. It's one of the reasons I sold the site, because it is simply too difficult for a small digital publisher to keep up with the changes Google is constantly demanding. If anyone doesn't believe G is a monopoly, I'm happy to dissuade them from that. They are -- they dictate how websites are to be designed and maintained if you want to show up in their results (and they have something of 85-90% of search market, so there's no point in trying to ignore them).
Search is indeed highly personalized to each person doing a search on G. One person's results will not look exactly like another person's (but there will usually be a lot of overlap). Having said that, we have a multitude of SEO tools we use to evaluate and analyze our positions for the various websites I still maintain, and I work every week on trying to get the needle moved.
We'll continue to work on MSF's ranking in G, but it's a process that takes time. Thanks again.