Question about Google search results?

[xoggoth]

Extrenal links to your site are supposed to be a significant factor although one is told they can tell if links are merely phony. Presumably, links from a google blog or something like BT Tradespace (free) should be ok.

[Fred Bloggs]

AFAIK, there are a number of Google servers and they don't all update at the same time. Some may be testing newer versions of the search algorithm, or you may be on google.co.uk instead of google.com, etc. Also if you have signed in and 'pinned' any results to the top they will always appear at the top.

Thanks, I always use google.com, clearing the Google cookie made things behave "normally" again.

[Fred Bloggs]

Extrenal links to your site are supposed to be a significant factor although one is told they can tell if links are merely phony. Presumably, links from a google blog or something like BT Tradespace (free) should be ok.

Yes, so I believe. I have about a dozen links back to my site the most significant being from DMOZ, I think. I believe by tidying up the site, making the HTML 100% W3C compliant and reducing (by a lot) the number of keywords I'm targeting to just 3 has all helped a great deal along with things like putting up an XML sitemap, tidying up the site pages titles and descriptions meta tags etc.... All this has made a difference as does simply just updating things regularly I think. My site now competes quite strongly with the likes of jobsite etc... for my chosen keywords (a job title).

[NickFitz]

Further to the whole "personalised results" thing, Google do this even for logged-out users based on a cookie as of late last year - this means that you will get personalised results on the same machine, although if you use another machine or a different browser on the same machine that will have a different cookie. If you are logged in, it's influenced by your search history.

Either way, you can get around this without logging out or deleting cookies: this Google help page explains how personalisation works for both logged-in and not-logged-in users, and has links to explanations of how to disable search history when logged in, and how to turn off customisation when logged out.

Personally I would prefer to have the option, when logged-in, to "Show results without using history" rather than having to completely remove and disable my search history, but that doesn't seem to be possible at the moment

[AtW]

Extrenal links to your site are supposed to be a significant factor

External

[Fred Bloggs]

Further to the whole "personalised results" thing, Google do this even for logged-out users based on a cookie as of late last year - this means that you will get personalised results on the same machine, although if you use another machine or a different browser on the same machine that will have a different cookie. If you are logged in, it's influenced by your search history.

Either way, you can get around this without logging out or deleting cookies: this Google help page explains how personalisation works for both logged-in and not-logged-in users, and has links to explanations of how to disable search history when logged in, and how to turn off customisation when logged out.

Personally I would prefer to have the option, when logged-in, to "Show results without using history" rather than having to completely remove and disable my search history, but that doesn't seem to be possible at the moment

Thanks, I'm now in the habit of tipping out my Google cookie when I want to check my website on Google.

[Durbs]

Thanks, I'm now in the habit of tipping out my Google cookie when I want to check my website on Google.

Or, if you use IE8 may be worth trying to open the browser window when testing using the Safety --> InPrivate option (i.e. pron mode) as this doesn't retain cookies.

Not tried it, but if its works it'd be easier to do that than to delete cookies.

[Fred Bloggs]

Or, if you use IE8 may be worth trying to open the browser window when testing using the Safety --> InPrivate option (i.e. pron mode) as this doesn't retain cookies.

Not tried it, but if its works it'd be easier to do that than to delete cookies.

Cheers, never thought of using IE8 at all actually. F'Fox 3.5.7 makes it extremely easy to selectively remove cookies though.

[NickFitz]

Or, if you use IE8 may be worth trying to open the browser window when testing using the Safety --> InPrivate option (i.e. pron mode) as this doesn't retain cookies.

Not tried it, but if its works it'd be easier to do that than to delete cookies.

That should work as long as you remember not to do anything else with Google for the duration of the session: InPrivate doesn't reject cookies, it just treats them all as session cookies. In other words, they are set and updated and so forth, and are returned to the server with each request, and thus have whatever effect they're meant to have on the current browsing session, but they are only held in memory (not written to disk) and are discarded when the session is ended by closing the window.

Cheers, never thought of using IE8 at all actually. F'Fox 3.5.7 makes it extremely easy to selectively remove cookies though.

Isn't it easier to click "Disable customizations" once and turn it off completely? Note that when you delete the cookie you automatically turn customisations back on again, so you potentially have to delete the cookie after every single interaction with Google to get reliable results. If you use the option Google provides, you can be sure it's turned off.

[Fred Bloggs]

Thanks NF, I haven't a problem with personalisation per se. So I think it's fine for me to just delete the Google cookie occaisionally when I want to see what changes to my webpages has done to their Google ranking.