If you have done any SEO campaign larger than submitting a blog post to ten social bookmarking sites, you have probably noticed some differences and inconsistencies in tracking your rankings in Google. The same search can yield different results for, let’s say, an American and a Canadian for exampe. This article will outline several reasons why the Google positions shown in your browser window aren’t always accurate.

Search history and preferences

The fact that Google collects information on your surfing habits on their platforms if you are logged on with any of their services (Gmail, Adsense, Adwords, Webmaster Tools etc.) is a well known fact. Log in to Google Dashboard and you would be amazed to find how much they know about you. They keep track of everything, from the emails you receive to the Youtube videos you watch. They also monitor your ‘web history’, namely the keywords you searched for and the results you clicked on.

In other words, if you often click results from, let’s say, mashable.com, chances are you will see a Mashable article higher in SERPs on a future search, as long as you are logged on to your Google account.

Why this could be a problem? Webmasters who run SEO campaigns would search for the keywords they are targeting and sometimes click on their own results. When that site is stored as ‘preferred’, Google will show misleading results. The workaround is simple: log off from all Google services when you are tracking your keywords.

IP Geo-targeting

This has nothing to do with local Google engines versus Google.com (run a search for ‘blog’ on Google.ca, then try Google.com, Google.de and Google.es and you will notice different placements.) What I mean is that Google sometimes filters the results based on your geographical location. A Canadian, an American and a European user are likely to get different results for the same search on Google.ca. If you are a Canadian trying to rank on Google.com with a site focused on the United States market, you might find that, even though you appear to hold the third spot for your keyword, someone in American will see it #7, someone in Asia #12 and someone in Europe #22. If you are trying to rank for a certain geographical region, you will need an IP address from that country to test your rankings accurately. You can use a public network like Tor to change your IP and see what kind of results are shown to users from around the world.

Desynchronization between Google data centers

Google stores its massive amounts of data on several servers which are synchronized periodically. Network routing delays (or various malfunctions on Google’s end) can sometimes lead to different results shown to two people sitting in the same room and using different ISP’s. However, such issues are scarce and are usually solved within minutes. There is no workaround—other than waiting a bit and refreshing your browser window. If you want to be overly cautious and be 101% sure that the rankings are accurate, you could check again from another IP outside your net block.