Google Search Results Geotargetting?
Tue, 30 May, 2006 – 12:09 am
I've been using Google Sitemaps on a few of my own and client's sites to monitor their rankings and visitors in the SERPs. Now I know Google has problems, despite what some say, especially as I'm watching one site drop from 2000+ pages to 2 and now just 1 page indexed! However on the other end of the bizarre, I'm finding that Google Sitemaps reports my Diet Blog to be ranking on average at number 1 for "pan fried lemon sole" (a favourite recipe of mine) yet when I search I cannot see it on the front page! I can even see that people have clicked on various similar phrases in my stats at Count Me Counter, yet when I view the page they were referred from I do not see my site on it.
I have a similar story with my osCommerce Templates site. According to Google Sitemaps, and according to Count Me Counter, I'm meant to have an average position of ninth and clicks from the first results page for the phrase "oscommerce templates", yet I can't find myself in the first 100.
I remember a few years back reading that Google displayed the results it thinks you want to see, also using your location to control your results too, so someone could see different results to you for the same phrase. I'm just wondering if that's becoming the case again.
I think so… i downloaded a freeware app that tracked position in google and it consistently gave a different response to what i saw on google itself… add to that a friend tried the same search terms on his connection and got a different result again.
Recently i noticed that if i stay logged in to google i get slightly different results than if i log out… i don't have gmail and i only ever login to use sitemaps so i'm guessing that solely on the content of the sitemaps i administer and the searches i perform under that login its tailoring my results..
By martin on Tue, 30 May, 2006