Here’s a practical solution to a problem anyone in the SEO industry will face: how to measure a site’s performance in the search engine results. This is a problem because different searchers will get different results.
Measuring a site’s performance is crucial not only when contractual compensation is tied to a site’s performance in the search engine results, but also when doing research about competitors and assessing how much a site has improved (or deteriorated) in response to SEO changes or algorithm updates.
It used to be easy: go to google.com, enter keywords, and start counting from the top until you hit the URL of the client’s site.
Nowadays, a site’s position is determined by how much Google thinks you like that site, in addition to the absolute ranking factors. Unfortunately, if you own a site, or are actively researching a site, you will tend to click through to that site a lot, and that will send it shooting up the rankings, skewing the results. I’m sure just about every SEO has experienced a false flicker of joy seeing the client’s site in the No. 1 spot, only to realize later that it was on account of being logged in.
It will only get worse: as Google start to incorporate more and more social signals, we will all start getting increasingly divergent results.
To make it worse, skewed results are displayed not only when you are logged into a Google account. Even seasoned SEO’s with a decade of experience can go wrong on this one. The other day I got an email from an SEO who gets so much business that he turns away half his clients. He said a blog post of his was now ranking on Page 1 of Google’s results for a particular keyword. I was surprised because the site hosting the blog was weak and it was a brand new post. I turns out, the post was on Page 3 of Google’s results, but appeared on Page 1 for him even though he wasn’t logged in to Google.
He was a little red-faced when I told him about it. So how do you avoid embarrassing incidents like that?
The only way to make sure that your personal preferences aren’t playing a role in the search engine results is to delete all google.com cookies. But deleting a stack of cookies each and every time is a bit of a chore (and annoying, because it turns Instant back on).
Furthermore, it’s not just personal preferences that influence the ranking, but region as well. Everyone knows that you can get different results depending on which country you are in, but I can also get startlingly different results searching from San Diego compared to searching from Kansas. This is because the search is fulfilled by different data centers, and the rate at which data populates the data centers isn’t uniform.
What is needed is a way to get uniform, standardized results for every query.
That is of course to specify the data center. But which one, and how?
Some of my clients like to use a ranking monitoring service. That might do it. The service references the same data center every time it searches, depending on where it is located. But which data center the service uses is unknown, and the services typically do not display real-time information. In my experience, monitoring services are generally correct but can be a little out of sync here and there.
The solution, of course, is to use a proxy server. But again, which one, and how? Most web proxy interfaces can’t be used for Google, because Google detects and denies proxies. And using a privately owned proxy may trigger the suspicion that the SEO is in cahoots with the proxy server’s owner, or even owns it outright. It would be fairly easy for a proxy’s owner to massage the results for a particular query.
So here’s what we do: we use Google as a proxy for searching Google. How? Google released a nifty little app called Google Mobilizer. This strips bells and whistles away from web pages, making them easily viewable on mobile phones. You can view websites from your mobile phone using Google Mobilizer, but you can also view websites from your desktop browser using Google Mobilizer.
Google Mobilizer is, in effect, a proxy which also happens to strip out irrelevant frills.
We use Google Mobilizer to view search results on Google Search. The results come with an amusing disclaimer (“This page adapted for your browser comes from www.google.com and is not endorsed by Google.”) but they’re from the most authoritative data center there is. These are the same results you would get when searching from the Googleplex, not logged in, and with cookies freshly deleted.
Here’s a sample. http://goo.gl/L3yUi
(I couldn’t resist wrapping it in the Google URL Shortener. That’s three layers of Google.)
The keyword in the sample is ‘diamonds’ and the list of websites in the results will be exactly the same no matter who views it from which location in what country.
Substitute the keyword in the URL with your own to get an authoritative and standardized real-time search result for everyone – your client, your employees, your subcontractors, and yourself.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
How to Get Standardized Search Results
