Seems pretty easy to check doesn’t it? Just type in the keywords you rank well for, and there is your website near the top of the results…
Actually that’s not your true ranking at all!
Check again using a friends computer and you’ll get a very different result.
This can be embarrassing. I did this many times at a friends houses before I figured out what was going on: “Hey, John check this out, my website is #1 for ‘xyz widgets’… hey wait a second, where the heck is it??” Stink!
Why does this happen?
Because over time Google learns about you, your search behaviour, and what results you like (through software such as browser plugins, cookies, and being signed in to your Google account).
So every time you do a Google search on your computer you are training the Google search algorithm.
Every time you click on a search result Google ticks a box to say “Yes! We gave that searcher the link they wanted!”. But everytime you return to the results using the “Back” button, Google ticks a box to say “No! That link wasn’t what they wanted, let’s try harder next time team!”.
That is one of the ways that Google incrementally improves their search results over time.
But you are just one person, and your behaviour has only a tiny impact on the world. But it has a huge impact to the search results you get from your computer!
So, you are pushing the link to your website higher up the search results because you are clicking on the link all the time (but most of the impact is confined to searches done on your computer).
How can you find out what your rank in Google really is?
There is 1 way to get a true indication of your rank in Google (actually there are many, but this is the easiest, cheapest, most accurate, non-biased way I have found).
And that is: RankTracker software.
The paid version is pretty expensive and doesn’t really add a lot of functionality.
The free version is fine (but not being able to save the reports can get a little annoying).
Download the RankTracker software and give it a try.
(And no, I don’t get paid for linking to them (yet), I just think it’s great software)
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Because of this article, Kevin from CuteRank.net asked me to review his rank checking software. It’s pretty good, and he’s just added Google.co.nz to the list of search engines.
It’s completely FREE, all you have to do is provide a link back to their homepage at http://www.CuteRank.net.
It’s not quite as user-friendly has RankTracker but Kevin and his team are working very hard on improvements on a daily basis.
In light of Google now offering personalized search results to EVERYONE – how does CuteRank stack up? Or RankTracker for that matter… Will be interesting to hear your thoughts on this one Sheldon.
Rank checkers will not show results based on your preferences. However it is interesting in relation to seo how the personalisation of search may effect results. I have found that it often has a customer on the phone because they think their rankings have dropped when they have not. This is usually due to them checking out their competition too often and not clearing the cookies out of their browsers! Easy fix, clear your cookies regularly..
Hi All,
I thought I would ask and share…using rank tracker software, how safe is it…I was using rank tracker software (link assistant) for about 2 – 3 weeks, checking regularly as we cleaned up our html code and wanted to see the positive results, if any. After about a week we noticed a nice bump up from page 2 to 1 for most of our targetted KW’s. Wow, we thought, great! Then after about another week all the while checking OZ, NZ and U.S SE’s every 2 – 3 days we noticed a VERY sharp decline in ranking (+80 in some cases/KW’s), looking for reasons after such a nice bump was of course a given.
Then it hit us and we started searching, it seems when you use google’s services TOO much especially while logged in to your G account, your site can actually get a penalty and that has actually happened to us before although we were not using rank tracking software but just overusing normal search for the same keyword (probably about 20 checks in a minute or so and we got locked out of being able to search, until we reset the internet connection).
Google must log your IP address, lookup to see if you have a G account or are logged in then somehow if it can determine you have a website related to that g account or I.P address they will filter out your website. It happened to us for about 2 weeks the first time, and about 3 weeks when we seemed to overuse the rank tracker software. We regularly clean cookies and not just through explorer/mozilla, we have very good software that deep cleans the cookies and junk that normally gets missed such as index.dat and others.
SO, be careful about using google search TOO much when checking your serp ranks, because from our experience your site can go into no man’s land as a precaution (in googles eyes) as they somehow think you are trying to manipulate serp’s so we definately agree with the above post (personalized results) but would like to add our experience and to also ask, if any software out there uses proxies or masks your IP address while doing the serp checking on your behalf ?
BTW overall rank tracker (link assistant) is really, really good but we are trying to determine that if it uses your IP address that google has already logged and possibly assigned to your account or personalised search profile, whether it’s just showing you what you want to see, or if it is indeed the true google results as joe blow would see if search from a fresh, never used computer…..
Relying on google for your main source of income is a big NO NO in our opinion because with each Algo update you risk the chance that your site will go “dancing” or simply vanish, it happens everyday so please try to put your eggs in bing/yahoo’s basket as well, we’ve found those SE’s to be a fair bit more stable than google.
Peace y’all, have a wonderful day.