3 monitoring tools are giving me the simular SERP ranking position but manual searching and traffic are telling me something different. What gives?

[TheOceanAgency]

I have looked up SERP position in 4 different tools, 3 out of the 4 (Raven, SEO Moz, and Google webmaster tools) are telling me that the site is ranking in the 90s range. When I manually search for the term (when I'm logged out), the site lists on the 1st pages. I also see it listed as the #9 spot when I use SEO Books Rank Checker. Last month, Google webmaster says that the term got us 200 impressions. Has anyone seen this before?

Thanks

[CarlLarson]

Hi Theresa.

There's an easy way to remove personalized search results. Just add &pws=0 to the end of the search url.

More info:

http://seattleseonetwork.org/2011/accurate-rank-checking/

[TheOceanAgency]

Thank you! This will be very helpful to send along to our client.

[seanmccauley]

Hi

It can be quite frustrating and very disappointing when you realise that your page 1 keyword position is due to you being logged in and when you log out it drops though a hole in the floor. It's clear you know how to log out...

Recently, we have subscribed to rank tracker from link-assistant tools. It does appear to be very accurate, and will give you a graph of your serps vs competitor...

[AlanBleiweiss]

Here's a screen cap.  Interestingly, I switched to a few different cities in my Google options, (signed out for all of them) and the top results all remained the same.  This tells me there's less "local" correlation for these sites than there is strong non localized SEO factors.

corporate-video-production-Google-Search_1307654867634.jpeg

[TheOceanAgency]

Can you do me a favor and google the term "corporate video production" and send me a screen shot of the top 10 search results? Or just send the names of the sites in the top 10 search results.

Thanks so much for your help!

[AlanBleiweiss]

Unfortunately, even when someone is logged out, Google still shows personalized results.  Not based on as much search history as when logged in, yet enough that it's not 100% guaranteed that what you see is what someone else will see.  While they don't reveal what the methods are for doing this, possibilities include

• Personal access info (your internet connection IP address)
• location data based on your internet service providers recorded location (the nearest access point to your connection)
• Cookies stored on your browser
• Which Google data center your connection pipes into.  As the index is updated, it's not instant across all data centers.

Individual tools will provide different information as well, depending on the method they use to query Google.

A very important concept is to understand that any data you obtain for a web site is, at best, useful mostly for observing trends, rather than trusting it's complete accuracy.

[TheOceanAgency]

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for your response. My browsing history was cleared and I still saw my client's website showing up in the top 10 search results.  SEO Book's Rank Checker Tool also produced the same ranking as my manual search.

[seoninja20]

Hi Theresa,

Did you clear your browsing history before you did the manual search? Your browser may be saving the site because you've already visited it. To go from the 90's to first page in your results is probably the browser.

Best Regards,

Daniel