has anyone seen weird psuedo personalization of serps going on?? I'm seeing this on one word terms. how to check client rank? one person working on a site and checking rank, sees it. another person checking out competitors (and not clicking on client site) doesn't see our site ranking... at all. I'm seeing 7 out of top 10 for competitive one word phrase dominated by pages on Craigslist. Oh... one of the guys in the other room has been hitting Craigslist like mad, looking for furniture. We're all off the same IP. Using an online rank check across datacenters tool show's us ranking on first page. Looking at site's stats however would suggest not- we're not getting the traffic behind the term. We can def say Google has turned up the Trust nob a tad. how to get a clear idea on where site really stands??? different user agents produce different results. clearing cookies of course as well..
google is a complete mess right now. I did notice dramatical serps changes on variuos datacenters giving completly different result. webmastertools and all that stuff is slow like hell, many other google services also. I was to start a new thread about that issue. it seems that google is shifting resources to whereever they need them for weeks now. many google services are slow or not working from time to time. this happend before the link update, it happend again before the directory update and it is happening again now. so I think we will be seeing a PR update soon, as this is the only major update still missing. either even this weekend or next one. greetz elwood
I'm interested to see if anyone is noticing anything similar. It appears that the SERPs are changing based on search usage. I looked for my site under a particular keyword, didn't see it. Used the the "site:" search operator on the same site. Did another search for my site under the previous keyword. There it was. Using another machine, I saw the same SERPs dominated by craigslist, which appears to be the result of a guy in the office searching / visiting craigslist. = Google changing the rankings based on the searches previously performed = Personalization. *However* I wasn't signed into any Google service. I think in layman's terms, signing into a service and authenticating yourself is kind of giving the Engine (or other service) permission to personalize its results. However, I feel alittle weird to think personalization might be happening when I'm not signed in. *If* this is truly taking place, and *if* this is where Google is moving, it is very significant. It would divide the traffic behind anyone term into infinite pieces- with each user seeing slightly different results (based on their own usage patterns, or rather Google's "guess" of what that user is looking for... another scary idea.) There wouldn't be a #1 site, but rather many. This means there would also not be any "standard". Or more importantly, guidance as you try to understand why one site ranks and another does not. Those previously at the top for any one term, would see that traffic diminish as Google rotates other sites in. On a cynical note (meaning Google's interest lies in making money. period.), what if Google was to *not* rotate the paid ads in the same manner? We all know that Organic outperforms Adwords- in clicks, costs and conversions. Personalizing organic search and not paid ads (or even according to different metrics) would allow them to favor ads for the potential for clicks. That keyword with all the traffic behind it? You can only get exposure to the full stream of that traffic through the paid. So let's hope that's not what's happening.