Where is the Google Search Result?

I had a client ask me the other day where his traffic was coming from, since he couldn’t find his listing in the top few pages of search results for a keyword that was showing up in his analytics reports.

The analytics system had reported that he’d received a number of visits from users who’d searched for “Keyword X” in Google and had clicked through to his site. Problem is, when he went and searched for “Keyword X”, he didn’t see any of his pages listed in the first dozen or so pages of results in Google, and he figured it’d be unlikely that a number of users would click very many pages deep anyway.

So, how did this traffic happen?

This isn’t the only time I’ve seen something like this happen. Probably a number of people have had the experience of calling up a partner or colleague to talk about something they see in the Google search results, only to find that the person at the other end of the phone sees a very different thing when they commit the same search in Google. The listing could be shown 9 places down from the top of the page instead of 2 places down, or it isn’t showing up at all for them while it’s showing plain as day for you.

Unfortunately, this is going to become a more and more common experience for webmasters. Google’s diversity of search products and results sets are becoming more and more differentiated for different users, and as this happens, people searching for the very same keyword are going to be seeing completely different search results. Read on for more details.

Web analytics programs commonly report the top search engine keywords that bring users to a site. As the search results for different users become individualized, if you’re a webmaster looking at the analytics metrics you’ll begin noticing that your site may get traffic for search terms when you can’t even see one of your pages listed, or you may not get traffic for somewhat popular terms where you see yourself listed in the very first position in the results page. The lack of clarity in reporting is exacerbated because many of the analytics systems can lump all traffic coming from “something.google.something” or “something.google.com” as being from the Google Search engine. This wildcarding effect might lead you to erroneously assume that all your traffic comes from the US-centric web search results on Google, when in fact you may be receiving traffic from a variety of Google sites in a variety of ways.

Here’s a quick list of some top reasons why your Google search results may appear different from someone else’s:

• Personalization. Google has begun to customize your search results in order to bump up the sorts of stuff that you seem to want so you can find it more easily. This can seem cool in cases where you are clicking on your own company’s pages more frequently, since it may make your CEO think your site is ranking high on his prestige keywords. But, trouble may happen when he is telling his friends about this and they see something different. So, how would you see what most users would be seeing? One way would be to disable the personalization, explained in this helpful thread on the Search Engine Roundtable: