Sometime last week I noticed that being signed into my google account (gmail) yielded our website a position #2 for our target keyword. However, when signing out of the user account or asking someone else to check SERPs we would show up page 2. Any idea why this would happen for my profile and not others? Is this some sort of smart filter based on toolbar pings?
This is Google customized search results. Google keeps track of your previous search/click behavior and tries to customize its results based on that data. So if you visit a site frequently, that site would get ranked high. In addition to this, Google also customizes results based on geographic location. So it is now tough to actually say you are ranked in a certain position as you might not be on other computers.
I noticed the same, but the differences are not so big - in my case it's about 2-4 positions. Explanation vansterdam gave seems to me reasonable, except the geographic factor because being signing out you are still in the same zone and G can see that based on you IP.
The google accounts can save your view and search results. So you search a keyword with your google accounts, the Google first show the page your viewed in Google se pages.
by typing in allinanchor:"keywords here" you can get an idea of where your position will be even when logged in as it goes by how many links with that specific phrase.
Exactly. You can enable or disable your web history by going here. I think he may have meant when searching via Google's "Country specific domains" For example, searching on google.com gives different results to searching on google.com.au. Cheers James