Rank Tracker Result Not Reflected In Google

[alrockn]

I'm tracking keyword results in Rank Tracker, but I can't confirm the positions when I do a Google search for the tracked keywords.  Does anybody know why RT says the site should be #23, but is not actually in Google?

Is there a way to check Google results from different data centers?  If I recall, Google allowed the option to view results from different cities, though I don't know if they still allow this.

[DavidLee]

Hey alrockn,

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. As others have mentioned, 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. If you have suggestions about how we might improve the technical process of fetching rankings data to get better data, please let us know and we'll pass it on to our engineering team. We're always looking for ways to get you better data

[JaneCopland]

Results are certainly displayed differently for different locations if the query is location-dependent (searching for [hospitals] from Rochester, NY in google.com will get you a very different result from doing the same thing in google.com in Sacramento).

You can change your perceived location in search settings, whether you are logged in or not: http://i.imgur.com/6xgLXAL.png

http://i.imgur.com/e9tuuua.png

Changing my location from its default (based on my IP, which Google actually gets wrong - it thinks I am an hour further south than I actually am) to a location in the north of England changes my results for such a query to reflect where I've said I am: http://i.imgur.com/GqNTKRG.png

I know there's a way to do this in an automated manner if you're building a rank checking tool (my former agency did this), but I'm afraid I don't know how to do this off the top of my head, so you're stuck with the manual option here.

I will assign this question to the Help Team as they will have more information about the IP location Moz's rank tracker crawls from.

Again, not sure what your queries are but they very much could be influenced by geo-location if they are at all dependent on a user's location.

[DJ123]

If you are searching for something more local, like say a real estate business for a certain town, you are probably going to get better results by searching yourself.

Clear out all of your cookies in your browser, as well as LSOs and all cached site data, then perform your search for each keyword in your browser.

I don't know for sure, but I believe there must be some kind of weighting that goes into where the geo-location of your IP address is so for something local, I have seen it have an impact in what gets displayed in the searches.

[LeadDiscovery]

When searching on Google use:  "Hide personal results" so that you properly mimic what moz picks up.

In moz look to see if your ranking are for an image, local or general serp. There should be an associated icon with your rank position.

Lastly, we have found that Moz rank positions are rarely spot on with Google. They can show general trends - you are on or around this rank, but rankings change frequently and Moz updates weekly. There is bound to be a discrepancy.

Yahoo and Bing positions for us are not even close. These sites are less of a concern, but we consistently find huge variations between MOZ reports and the engines results on the day of the MOZ report run. It is not uncommon to find that the MOZ report simply fails to report anything.