Rank tracker based on personalization or not?

[MassivePrime]

I have been using the rank tracker to update clients on their current positions/improvements etc. but have been told a number of times now that the results they were seeing were not the same. Does the rank tracker work by giving results based off my location or from somewhere else or what? I should mention that I am based in Malta and my clients are based in the UK and Italy (with their sites being optimized for local keywords) I also ask them to clear their browsing history and to restart their browser before they check.

[AdamThompson]

A few suggestions:

• Google can show different results based on your location - even for users in different areas of the same country.
• I doubt the SEOmoz rank tracker even calculates where your location is. If anything, results are probably given for wherever SEOmoz's servers are.
• When you do a Google search, you can change your location manually to see results for a different location than where you are.
• Clearing browsing history and restarting their browser may not be enough. They should also be signed out of Google.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hi there!

I agree that Adam's answer is a good answer to your question and just wanted to add that we do not include personalized results for any of our rankings, even based on the location of our servers. There can be a lot of variation in what different people, searching from different computers/locations might see in the rankings. Our solution has been to run searches from a variety of IP addresses and IP blocks using non-personalized, search history/location agnostic requests. In our experience, these have provided the most accurate results, showing what the "most" users see, though we know there's still quite a bit of room for fluctuation.

Most search engines will personalize your results based on your search history. It does help to recommend that your clients are logged out when performing a search. For Google, they can also try adding &pws=0 to the end of the query string to help remove personalized results.

Search engines also customize results based on location. This means users in one city often see very different results than users in another location.

I hope this helps! If you have any other questions about this, or any of our tools, I recommend that you write in to us at help@seomoz.org. That's what the Help Team is here for !

-Chiaryn

[MassivePrime]

Hi thanks for the reply (first time a moz staff member gets in touch with me Woot!) I've literraly copied part of your answer and sent it to my clients and it seems to have done the trick! Thanks a million!

[ChiarynMiranda]

So glad I could help sort things out!