I want my Google SERPs to be as “pure” as possible, with every personalization / historical search weighting thing turned off (aka free from anything that might skew them so I can do apples-to-apples comparisons to track performance.) So what I do before I run a SERP audit is:
(1) I make sure I’m signed OUT of Google
(2) I clear my browser (Chrome) cache and all cookies
(3) I go here: Google Opt Out to DISABLE customizations based on search activity.
HOWEVER, there is still SOME personalization going on, AT LEAST GEOGRAPHICALLY, because even after I do the above 3 things, the SERPs are different (in some cases dramatically) depending on where I’m searching from. For example, when I run a search for club promoter when I’m in Miami, there are a lot of Miami-based nightclub-related pages in my SERPs. But when I run it from Montreal, there are a lot of Montreal-oriented pages. And the difference can be DRAMATIC in some cases: when I follow the 3 steps above to turn off all personalization, and I run a Google search for keyword XYZ:
(i) when I’m in Montreal, my website is #56 in Google SERPs
(ii) when I’m in Miami, my website is not in the top 500 (!!)
So two questions:
(1) Is there anything else I can do to make my search results as “pure” as possible? (esp. related to geography?)
(2) What could account for such a DRAMATIC difference (described in (ii) above where my site can move around hundreds of slots for the same keyword search from different cities)?
Right, that crossed my mind too. Just for the simple reason that I want to track performance…but I travel a ton. So if I wanted to track performance, say, every Monday, there’s no guarantee that I’ll be in the same city as the prior week so I want to just take geography out of the equation completely…but from my research over the last 36 hours, i don’t think it’s possible.
If you want to track constant performance then perhaps one option is to browse using a VPN? That way, Google will think you are browsing from the same location every time you check.
[FONT=verdana]Conducting your own searches is probably the worst way to track the performance of your site within the SERPs. Even after you’ve cleared your cookies, signed out of Google, and done all the other things you mentioned, there will still be several other factors that affect what you see in the SERPs - and not just geographical ones. For example, the results will also be affected by which of Google’s data centres handle your query, and they could also vary from hour to hour during the day.
Put another way, there’s no such thing as a “pure” search result. Even if you achieved such a thing, your potential customers won’t, so what you see will have nothing to do with what they see.
If your aim is to measure the change in the performance of your site - that is, to see whether it is going up or down, rather than its absolute position - then you’d be better off using a service such as Google Webmaster Tools. In fact, this does give an absolute ranking, but that’s an average over all the searches that are actually performed. More usefully, it gives the change in the ranking over a specified timescale.