What are the factors that have an impact on the google search results?

[sauspiel]

When I compare the ranking of my keywords with the Moz Rankings and my own search results I get different results even I use the google chrome incognito browser (not logged in, no cookies, no cache) and it's definitely the same country-setting (google.de) where the search is run. I double checked it with several browsers and computers, and I still get a different result as the Moz Ranking Tracker.

The keyword is "schafkopf" and the site is www.sauspiel.de. The relevant country is Germany (www.google.de).

Does anyone know the reason why the results differ? Could it be the search query was made from different countries/IPs? Any ideas, hints?

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Sauspiel,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that your rankings are looking off in the Web App. I'm not sure why you would be getting different results in the Web App rankings than you would be getting when you run the searches yourself; it could be a lot of things. The search engines - Google, Yahoo! & Bing - all maintain multiple indices that run across multiple datacenters. This means if you query different datacenters, you can get somewhat different ranking results. Other elements, such as personalization, geography and search history (even if you're logged out of your Google/search engine account) can also influence ranking positions. Hence, there can be a lot of variation in what different people, searching from different computers/locations might see in the rankings.

Our solution has been to run searches from a variety of IP addresses and IP blocks using non-personalized, search history/location agnostic requests. In our experience, these have provided the most accurate results, showing what the "most" users see, though we know there's still quite a bit of room for fluctuation.

In the meantime, I can try to see if it's a bug on our side if you can let me know...

1. The campaign that is having this issue
2. The keyword and URL combination that is having discrepancies
3. The ranking that you're getting in Google versus what the Web App tells you.

If you prefer to provide this information privately, you can email us at help@moz.com.

Chiaryn
Help Team Ninja

[sauspiel]

Thank you for your quick response! This definitely helps to have results not influenced by the search history. But as I wrote, I already logged out even used a "new" browser and computer and still got different results than the moz rank tracker... As this still differs, there must be more factors than cache, cookies and search history that have an impact on the search results.

I found the hint to use the google adword keyword preview und there you can select an area (city) from where the google search is performed. Interesting enough it seems that you get different results for a search query on google.de depending if you perform the search in Berlin or in Munich...

[DrewR]

I'm not sure if you've already given this a try. If not, give it a shot and see if this data matches Moz:

Add a “&pws=0” to the end of Google URL after you search the normal way. For example: http://www.google.de/search?q=schafkopf&pws=0.