All webmasters are interested in where their website ranks for the keywords they are targeting. Some check monthly, some weekly and the obsessive every day. But how many of them are actually looking at the ‘real’ ranking results?
If you have a Google account, which includes YouTube, Gmail, Googlemail, Google+ etc the results you see in the search results are not ‘true’ organic results. Google gives websites that have been viewed either by yourself or by someone in your Google+ circle more value and ranks the webpage higher than normal.
This post isn’t really for going into why your results aren’t ‘real’, if you have a question on that area let me know in the comments and I will try to answer it.
There are several ways to get ‘real’ ranking results, this is my favourite and I’m not sure how many people use it.
As far as I know this only works in Chrome, let me know if anyone else has got it working in another browser.
The idea is to create your own search engine with extra parameters that removes your personal settings.
- Open up Google Chrome browser
- Click on the spanner
- Settings
- This will show the basics setting page, click on ‘Manage Search Engines’
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you should see 3 fields for you to fill in
- This is where you create your new search engine
- Create a name for it, anything you like in the first field
- The second field enter in pws
- And finally the third field should contain: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%s&pws=0&gl=uk
- Press enter and find the newly added search engine in the list
- If you hover over the entry a ‘Make Default’ button should appear
- Click it!
That’s it.
To use type into the URL bar the keyword you wish to search for and hey presto ‘real’ search results.
If you still would like to take advantage of the personalised search results just enter your search query into the search bar on the Google homepage.
Hope that helps!