For the last year, Google has been showing personalized search results– did you know that if you are logged in versus not, you’ll often see different search results? Thus, you may be thinking that you rank highly on a search term for you or your client– but really it’s because you search for that term all the time, skewing results. Just look in the upper right corner to see if it says “logged in”.
One way to handle this is to add “pws=0″(without the quotes) to the end of the search query. That’s a lot better than the drudgery of logging out to do searches and then having to log back in again. Try it!
Google is already personalizing search based on a whole bunch of factors, such as where you are, what your past search behavior was, and data from other Google services you use. Thus, the concept of ranking #1 doesn’t really make sense anymore. So what do we do now? We look at how much traffic we get, not what position we rank on.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.
You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.
You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.