As we’ve known for a while, Google will personalize your search results if you are signed in to a Google account. However now, even if you aren’t signed in, Google will still utilize your previous search history queries, clicks, and other search preferences to show results specifically catered to you. So how can we see non-personal results like an average user?
Depersonalizing Search Results
1. Be sure you’re signed out of your Google account.
2. Do a few searches until you get the “Web History” link to appear in the top right corner of your screen.
3. Then click the “Web History” link.
4. Then select “Disable customizations based on search activity”.
Until you do this, your search results will be skewed from what everyone else is seeing, because Google takes into account what sites you visit most often, etc. Webpages you visit more often will actually rank higher in Google’s search results. This is implemented by Google to ensure a better, more relevant experience for its users, however for an internet marketing company, it can spell danger.
Be especially weary of this when reporting ranking results to clients, as a client may appear higher in a search on your computer than they would on their own machine.
At TriMark Solutions, we don’t like to give away too many of our internet marketing secrets, but we figured we’d be nice on this, and keep you from providing possible false information to your clients (or maybe explain to you why you client is saying they aren’t seeing the same results as you are).
Keep checking in with the Inside TriMark Blog for more SEO & Internet Marketing Tips to help improve your client relationships.
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[...] results by a very manual and sometimes tedious process outlined by Dylan Benton in his post on depersonalizing Google Search results. Although not the most convenient for and SEO, this way may help clients to check for [...]