Google Personalized Search: Caution – Be Careful how you Search!

Do you own a business?  Do you have a website for your business?  Do you actively check where you are ranking on Google?  Have you noticed that the results lately are not changing when you search terms that you regularly search for?

In its never ending efforts to increase and maximize its relevancy effectiveness, Google is implementing “Personalized Search” under the belief that the search engine should also take into account the history and patterns of the individual when generating search results.

So, if you are looking for “widgets” and you do so repeatedly to see who is ranking and who is not, Google is detecting the search term and the sites you visit; even on the level of your public IP address.  So even if you set your browser options to remove all private data, including cookies, every time you close your browser, if Google also links your searches with your IP address, you will find that you are getting the same results over and over again.

Clearly, unintended or intended, Google is impairing your ability to monitor your progress and relative placement of organic results for your website and your competitors by simply returning the same results every time.

Here is how you can deal with this?  The next time you want to see the results of regular searchers for your keywords, add the following suffix to the URL of the Google Search Page: &pws=0.  Adding this suffix and rerunning the search will give you a “pure” search without including your personalized habits or history.  Only in this way, can you ascertain where your real rank is for those who are looking for your products and services.  It’s a bit of a pain but you clearly are testing to get the real result and this is the way to do exactly that without being encumbered by Personalized Search.

Arthur Cooper

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