Why Your Search Engine Ranking is Not Accurate
Posted by Holly in Design, SEO Website Optimization
This is a tip I received from my close friend who works for a big SEO firm in Wisconsin.
If you have your own website, and you are trying to reach a higher ranking in the search engines for certain keywords, this tip will help you. Personally, I go to Google at times to see if my website is in the first page of the search results for the keywords I am targeting and trying to reach. But recently, I discovered that my search results were inaccurate. Most likely, yours may be too.
It turns out, Google saves and records your search history and uses that when you do Google searches in the future. So if I do a search, the results are actually skewed and not the same as what you someone else may see. In order to stop Google from personalizing your search results, you need to disable their personalized results. It’s kind of a pain to do this, but necessary if you want to know where your site really ranks.
To disable the personalization, type in the search terms and click enter or search. Then look at the URL address bar above. This is an example: http://www.google.com/search?q=google+blog
The example I showed is what the person would see in the URL address bar after typing in “google blog” (without the quotes) into the search box. In order to disable the personalization, you go to the address bar and add: &pws=0 to the end of your URL string.
Normal search for “google blog”: http://www.google.com/search?q=google+blog
Disabling the personalization: http://www.google.com/search?q=google+blog&pws=0
I hope that makes sense and hope this helps. If you need more information, there is a great article here: How to Disable Google Personalized Search that explains it in more depth.
20 Responses to “Why Your Search Engine Ranking is Not Accurate”
Leave a Reply
Cary Bergeron
19. Aug, 2009
Nice tip.
However after running a couple keywords that I thought I ranked for I’ll take the green pill now thank you
Holly
19. Aug, 2009
Aww I understand that. Some keywords I thought I was higher for, actually I am not. It’s good to know what the real search engine placement is.
Dave Doolin
19. Aug, 2009
Excellent tip, thanks. Makes perfect sense for what I was seeing. Don’t have time to deal with this right now, putting it on my task list.
Stefan
19. Aug, 2009
I always use the plugin Stealther for this purpose. By using it Google have no clue of your personal searches. If they don’t save searches by IP, but I don’t think so.
Holly
19. Aug, 2009
Thank you Stefan – is this a Firefox plugin? I am definitely interested in using that instead of the &pws=0 way!
Jenny
19. Aug, 2009
This is a great tip, I will be sure to use it. I believe Stealther is Firefox, I just didn’t know exactly how to use it till now.
Thanks to you both!
Klaus @ TechPatio
20. Aug, 2009
For once, personalization isn’t necessarily a good thing – specially for us bloggers who like to keep tabs on how well certain keywords are ranking
Anna
20. Aug, 2009
Oops – I noticed this almost a year ago – and didn’t realize that others weren’t aware of it. I probably should have posted about it then … in any case, there is also a link on the top right of the screen you can click to turn off personal results. I also only check my rankings when I am not logged into my Google account. It is pretty annoying though.
I didn’t know about &pws=0 ! Thanks for this, this will come in handy.
Anna
20. Aug, 2009
Just one other thing – sometimes results are different in different geographical locations. When I have been in doubt about a ranking I’ve usually asked someone in another state or country to double check it – that is another way of verifying if what you see is real! But only for the important keywords of course – you can’t really do this to check every single one.
Personality Marketing
21. Aug, 2009
Good tip, I didn’t know about the little url addition, but I did know about the personal results and like anna, assumed most knew you could turn it off.
I always have my buddies check in various locations, to see where I’m actually at.
I’m talking UK, Canada, Vegas…Equador…you know….the normal stuff
hahaha
Dave in Larryville
21. Aug, 2009
Gotta love it. 60 seconds. Learn something new and a couple of valuable tools.
How cool is that?
Thanks Holly… and Co.
Holly
21. Aug, 2009
I’m glad you like this Dave!
Thanks for stopping by!
Vic of BusinessAccent
22. Aug, 2009
Hi Holly,
Thank for sharing this. I just bookmarked it. I am not aware of this and definitely I will try your tip. I’m also always excited to see my blog’s position in the search engines.
Irish Tom
23. Aug, 2009
Hi Holly
This is a very useful article and opens a lot of doors.
I come across this about 6 months ago, and like Anna, figured everyone knew about it.
I really like the idea from Stefan which uses “Stealther” from Firefox.
I recently uploaded Firefox and find it so much better than IE and as I was originally concerned about downloading it, Holly advised it was very compatable so thank you Holly.
Cheers
Tom
Holly
23. Aug, 2009
You’re welcome Tom! I love Firefox, and love the add-ons they have. Glad this helped!
Bill Vlasak
23. Aug, 2009
A ranking of ’0″ doesn’t tell me much although my blog name and comments on several other blogs show up in the search engine indexes of Google,Yahoo,Bing and Mr.Wong.
Anna
24. Aug, 2009
Joe you are so funny
“I’m talking UK, Canada, Vegas…Ecquador…you know….the normal stuff …”
Stefan
26. Aug, 2009
@Holly: Yes, it’s a plugin for Firefox. But it seems to me like they made it into a core function in the latest version of Firefox.
Pat
23. Sep, 2009
Thanks Holly, i learn somethink new every day! (Actually i’m learning quite a LOT of new things every day!)
Cheers
Pat
website design
26. Jun, 2010
also, make sure you’re not logged into the google webmaster tools, that seems to skew the results too.
i wonder if they hold data based on IP or if it just local – i guess just local because it would be hard to record IPs for everyone, but then they are google, its often surprising what they hold data on, after all they do have the ENTIRE internet indexed!