Internet Business and Personal Success

I’ve been wondering about this for a while, and finally decided to try a few things.

If you have a web site, and are working at ranking well for a certain keyword, you may not know what page you really show up in Google for one simple reason:

You’re logged into your google account when you make the search (or have Google Toolbar)

Yep, that’s it. Now, I’ve finally verified it in a non-internet marketing related niche. Let me explain so you can try some things on your own.

As far as I know, this only applies to Google, and for those with a Google tool bar or a Google account that they are usually logged in to. Who knows, it might apply to other search engines are well.

I was looking for where this niche site ranked on a specific 2 word phrase. One day the results would show #15 (second page), the next it would be #9 or 10 (first page). Since no changes were made on to the site, and it seemed to bounce around at will, I initially chalked it up to changes the competitors were making to their sites, or a Google change.

Still, after a few weeks, it got me wondering just why this was happening.

I seemed to remember that Google wants to “help” the searcher by using past searches and site visits as an aid in coming up with the best possible results for all new searches. If you have an Amazon account, you’ll be very familiar with all of the little tricks that they use to give you recommendations based on past searches, and purchases there. This is the same thing, but done by your search engine of choice!

So, I did the search in my normal Firefox browser. It came up at #9. I was logged into my Google account for this search.

Next I went to Internet Explorer, which I only use as a cookie and settings-free browser to perform certain tests on. I entered the same search, and the target site showed as #15 (page 2). I was not logged in to any account, and cookies were cleared.

I went back to my Firefox browser, and logged out of my Google account. Entered the search phrase, and came back as #15, just like in Internet Explorer.

Experiment over for now.

My guess is that since I’d frequently visited the site(s) I was trying to rank, it moved the results up when I searched on a phrase that the site was included in–much like Amazon will start finding reasons to show new/different results as you browse or shop.

Lesson learned:

You may not know exactly what page your site will show up for any given keyword, for any given individual. Their results may be based on past searches, just like yours are when logged into your Google account.

What can you do about it? I suspect: not much, other than to keep generating good, related content to inch ever higher in the overall rankings.

Just remember not to spout off about your page one ranking without at least checking whether you get the same results after logging off of your account. Even then, you don’t know if they’re logged in and getting entirely different results as well.

Thoughts on this? Comment below…

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