Google Personalised Search Study & How It Affects Ranking
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo) -Or should that be Google personaliZed search? 
Anyway…. David Harry of the SEO Dojo has pulled together an interesting study about Personalised Search (how Google changes rankings based on various metrics included being signed into a Google account)
We decided to take a set of queries to build a session (task) in a space that may or may not be familiar to the respondents. The queries we used were;
‘antique lamps’
‘buy antique lamps’
‘buy lamps online’We also asked them to tell us;
- Where they’re located (region/country)
- Which browser they’re using
- Cleared search history lately?
- Is personalized/search history on?
- Most common Google app used
- If they had searched for ‘lamps’ or furnishings in the last 60 days
The goal being to start understanding what may or may not be influencing the search result flux. While we had some questions to be answered, there was no initial bias (hypothesis) behind the analysis. It should also be noted that the entire collection process only lasted 4 days so that we could try our best to avoid any temporal anomalies.
Read the whole post and results here – Google re-ranking and personalized search study
This is a very difficult area to monitor and draw conclusions from – and an area I’ve certainly neglected. Hence the link. Worth a read.
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I get a daily report of my ranking against some terms and I am quite used to seeing massive changes which are reversed a day or 2 later (or not!). I think that sort of thing would mess up their test because of the way they did it.
I have made the following observations in google.co.in
They were noticed if your browser accepts a cookie
You click on a particular link for a certain search.
Then you conduct few more searches for a similar terms
and click on the same link (or link from same site)
After doing this few times the result from that website will appear higher in the search result than it really is.
This can be verified by clearing the browser cache.