3 Reasons Why Your SERP Might Appear Wrong
Let me start off by saying Happy New Year 2014. I was bit busy in the New Year and here is my first blog post in the 2014. SERP or search engine ranking position is a very important factor in SEO. Knowing the correct position of your website is critical when running a business or other type of organization. But do you really know the correct position of your website in Google? You could be wrong! And here are 3 reasons why.
SERP Reason 01: Gmail Logged-In
This applies if you check your SERP from the web browsers. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Chrome regardless of the browser you use they all use cookies to store session data and ultimately when you are logged in to your Gmail account, it will track all the searches you made on Google search as keywords. At the same time it keeps a list of websites you visited recently stored as frequent websites. To verify this do a Google search on a website that you frequently visited. The same way Google will keep your website mapped for those certain keywords and it will appear on the top of the results. These misleading results can mix up your campaigns. The remedy is simple. Just make sure you clear your cookies and logged out of all respective Google services before making a search in order to find correct SERP.
SERP Reason 02: Browser Cache
Cache works similar to Gmail storing your session data. The only difference is that it stores the information locally. Browsers keep cache to help you load websites faster. This cache can mess your SERP results up. It will show the websites you have visited on cache. You can clear this cache by going to the browser preferences and in most of the browsers these settings are categorized under privacy. Clear your cache and reopen your browser before manually searching for your SERP. An cached result is shown below.
SERP Reason 03: ISP
This is the worst-case scenario that can happen when you are searching for search engine ranking position of your websites. Did you know that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) can cache/store the websites you frequently access and retrieve while you search? ISP’s are doing this to save their traffic and to control bandwidth. If this happens you will never know what went wrong with your SERP results. Your SERP results will be mixed up and you wont have a clue about how it happened.
How ISP can cache results?
In client server architecture, when a client (personal computer) first makes the request, server opens a dedicated line for that client in order to transfer data after accepting the request. But the requests are going through the ISP to the server. ISP works as a mediator and cache frequent searches / request made by the client in order to save the network jam. Ultimately you will receive already cached results that are older. You can find a descriptive diagram below.
Even though you use a SERP monitoring software, you wont be able to avoid this issue. But the remedy for this is to use a PROXY software or a PROXY website. Using PROXY only you can see the difference of search results. Then you can determine the true position of your business or other websites. Please see the video below to for further clarification.