Rank Tracking & Personalized Search
-
How effective is rank tracking when google tends to deliver personalized search?
I tend to clear out my browser of all info, cookies and cache so I can get the best results but how effective are rank tracking algo's in delivering accurate results. I run various apps and tests and I get different results.
-
The best way to be close to "real rankings" is to use Chrome with incognito window.
BUt again like you said there are additional factors that it looks are becoming more and more important that you can not reproduce - location, google plus circles and so on.
Cheers.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Weird Bing Search Results
Hi all, I'm hoping someone can explain what's going on here, because after hours of searching I cannot find anyone having the same problem... We use Bing search to provide the site search functionality on our website and recently for a particular keyword search, the results include several pages which are not on our site: they are on completely different domains! You can replicate it by going to bing.com and using the "site:" operator together with that keyword. Again, results from other domains appear in amongst the pages on our site. I cannot find any other keywords which produce this same behaviour: every other keyword I have tried shows only results from our site. However, I obviously haven't tested absolutely every possible keyword combination. Bing isn't "padding" out the results or anything like that, because we have more than enough pages referencing this term on the site, and I'm at a total loss as to why this is happening. So, I suppose my question is: has anyone ever had this happen to them? And if so, what did they do about it? Many thanks, Dan
Algorithm Updates | | clarkovitch0 -
Can you rank without spending lots of money?
Hello Everyone, This is a general question, and its one I have been thinking about recently because I am working on promoting couple of websites. I want to know if it is still possible to make websites rank consistently without spending lots of money. I am self employed, and 5 or so years ago, I remember I did all my own link building/content for about 6 or so websites that I owned, and I managed to make most of them rank consistently. I am not in the SEO business, and I have not touched any SEO type of work for about 5 years now. And I always did it for my own websites/business. I know this is a fast moving industry, and my general knowledge may be a bit out of date. I kind of get the feeling that the days of when small business owners could make a website rank on a shoe string budget and make a bit of money with an online business may have died or is dying. I am a realist and I know that only a very tiny percentage of websites make really good quality/fresh content that everyone wants to reads. I know a common advise is that you should create a site with such amazing content that everyone talks about you and mentions/links to you without you even to need to do any link building. But in my opinion (I could be wrong), but I feel that this probably happens to less than 0.01 percent of websites. And I also know even third rate websites with blogs or content sites charge to post an article with a link. So this makes me think that nowadays you need a good budget and plenty of time to make a website rank. Am I wrong? In today's internet, do you need to spend money to rank? I genuinely want to know peoples experience and or opinion on this subject. Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Ryan.Shahed0 -
Canonical tag on search.asp resultpage or what to do?
Hi, Im starting out doing SEO on my websites. My issue now is, that I have this searchpage called search.asp where it's possible to search for profiles on my website. When you go to search.asp the page displays all profiles as default, and it's then possible to change things like age, hairlenght and lots of small variables. When you submit the queries, the url would be some linke this:
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
wwww.site.com/search.asp?agefrom=10&ageto=40&haircolor=1&area=Denmark and so... There is thousands of different "urls" it could change to, which is kinda bad in SEO i guess. ATM the title tag is always "Searching for profiles", but i plan to change that, so the searchquery would be part of the title. The problem is, that right now, this page generates tons of dublicate content. So, my issue is, what to do? 1. Should I create a or would that "harm" my site? 2. Other ideas? /Kasper0 -
Indexing of Search Pages
I have a question on indexing search pages of an ecommerce or any website. I read Google doesn't recommend this and sites shouldn't allow indexing of their search pages. I recently attended an SEO event (BrightonSEO) and one of the talks was on search pages and how big players like eBay, Amazon do index their search pages. In fact, it is a core part of the pages that are indexed. eBay has to do it, as their product pages are on a time frame and Amazon only allows certain category search pages to be indexed. Reviewing my competitors, they are indexing search pages and this is why they have thousands and millions of web pages indexed. What are your thoughts? I thought search pages were too dynamic (URL strings) and they wouldn't have a unique page title, meta description or rich content to act as a well optimised page. Am I missing a trick here? Cyto
Algorithm Updates | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
How does this site rank no 1 for big terms with no optimisation?
Hi, A client recently asked me abut a site that appears to have popped up out of nowhere and is ranking for big terms within their industry: http://bit.ly/11jcpky I have looked at the site for a particular term: Cheap Beds I was using unpersonalised search on google.co.uk with location set to London. The site currently ranks no 1 for that term and other similar terms. The question is how? SEO Moz reports no backlinks (they must have blocked?) Ahrefs and Majestic report report some backlinks but not many and no anchor text with the term in. The Page title and meta do not contain the term nor does the page seem to contain the term anywhere. The domain does have some age though has no keyword match in the URL. I'm a little stumped to how they are achieving these results. Any Ideas Anyone?
Algorithm Updates | | JeusuDigital0 -
Do you think Google is destroying search?
I've seen garbage in google results for some time now, but it seems to be getting worse. I was just searching for a line of text that was in one of our stories from 2009. I just wanted to check that story and I didn't have a direct link. So I did the search and I found one copy of the story, but it wasn't on our site. I knew that it was on the other site as well as ours, because the writer writes for both publications. What I expected to see was the two results, one above the other, depending on which one had more links or better on-page for the query. What I got didn't really surprise me, but I was annoyed. In #1 position was the other site, That was OK by me, but ours wasn't there at all. I'm almost used to that now (not happy about it and trying to change it, but not doing well at all, even after 18 months of trying) What really made me angry was the garbage results that followed. One site, a wordpress blog, has tag pages and category pages being indexed. I didn't count them all but my guess is about 200 results from this blog, one after the other, most of them tag pages, with the same content on every one of them. Then the tag pages stopped and it started with dated archive pages, dozens of them. There were other sites, some with just one entry, some with dozens of tag pages. After that, porn sites, hundreds of them. I got right to the very end - 100 pages of 10 results per page. That blog seems to have done everything wrong, yet it has interesting stats. It is a PR6, yet Alexa ranks it 25,680,321. It has the same text in every headline. Most of the headlines are very short. It has all of the category and tag and archive pages indexed. There is a link to the designer's website on every page. There is a blogroll on every page, with links out to 50 sites. None of the pages appear to have a description. there are dozens of empty H2 tags and the H1 tag is 80% through the document. Yet google lists all of this stuff in the results. I don't remember the last time I saw 100 pages of results, it hasn't happened in a very long time. Is this something new that google is doing? What about the multiple tag and category pages in results - Is this just a special thing google is doing to upset me or are you seeing it too? I did eventually find my page, but not in that list. I found it by using site:mysite.com in the search box.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Why is my domain URL ranking instead of individual pages?
Hello, Google is ranking my homepage for many keywords instead of showing the various sites pages? Any idea why? Thanks, David
Algorithm Updates | | DavidSpivac0 -
CTR for Google Rankings
I run a local business, and I'm working on ranking for keyword + city. I currently rank on the first page for just about every keyword I'm working on, but only the top 3 for a little less than half. Because the search volume is so low for each keyword (for most cities Google doesn't have an estimated monthly search volume) the grand total of a few searches a month for each keyword + city combination is where I get my traffic. Although I seem to be getting consistently higher in the rankings, I am curious as to how much more traffic I can expect. I read somewhere that sites that are ranked number one are clicked 50% of the time, number two 20% of the time, number three 15% and from there on it goes down fast. Rank 7 and on is below 1%. Probably around 30% of my keywords are ranked between 7-10 and probably about 20% are ranked 4-6. Are the CTR numbers fairly accurate? I understand that there are a lot of influences on CTR, such as title/description, but generally is that somewhat accurate? If it is, I am missing out on A LOT of traffic. I am pulling about 800 unique visitors a month from Google. If I get in the top 3 for most of my keywords, can I expect significantly more traffic? I ask the question because there are many other things I could be doing with my time to help the business aside from SEO. I don't want to be working constantly on SEO if traffic is only going to increase very little.
Algorithm Updates | | bjenkins240