How to Deal with Google Personalised Results and the Effects
Glen Allsopp / 
8 Comments / 
June 11th, 2008 / 
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If you work for an internet marketing company you will fully understand what I’m talking about. If you don’t, one day soon you are probably going to run into this issue so keep reading.
Google’s Personalised results is their way to show results to a user that they think would suit them best based on that users browsing and click history; for the average Google user, this is great news. However, when you are checking hundreds of keywords for tens of sites there can be some big issues; let me explain.
Problems with Personalisation
When you are checking out a website you are working on, a lot of search queries you do may involve site: and link: commands, many of which will lead you to click through to the website. Or, you may simply be checking if other people are talking about you and then end up clicking through to your website.
When you click on a result so much, Google thinks that you prefer results from that site (which makes sense) and thus is more likely to show you it in the results. However, there have been two major problems I’ve noticed with this:
1. False Sitelinks
You know the mini-links you see under a website name when you search for it by it’s main keywords:
Believe it or not, as soon as I logged out of my gmail account, the site no longer had sitelinks. I even asked friends to check and they couldn’t see them. As soon as I logged back in…back came the sitelinks. Now this may have been a cause of various factors (I think I have legitimate sitelinks now) but one of the main reasons In my opinion was through personalised search.
Let’s look at another example:
2. Keyword Rankings
One client that I was working with went to no.1 rankings for a keyword that they really shouldn’t be ranking for (new website, minimal backlinks). I had a feeling that personalised results may be at play so I did a rankings check on multiple datacenters and they were nowhere to be found.
Once again, logging out of my Google account and refreshing the page meant that the rankings disappeared, definitely not a coincidence in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not against the personalised results, you just have to realise that as an internet marketer everything might not be as it seems.
How to Remove Personalisation
There are multiple ways to stop your results from being ‘personalised’, and I’ve outlined the easiest and most effective ones below. Of course, nothing beats checks from others and ‘computers’ to verify things as I would never report to clients on manual checks from a single source.
- Log out of your Gmail Account
If you don’t use any of Google services then you won’t need to do this. For me however, I’m hooked on Analytics, Google Reader and Google Apps for Business. If you don’t have to be logged in all day then simply log out.
You may also want to do your ‘manual checks’ when logged out as well. Simple but effective.
- Amend Your URL
You can also disable personalised search by adding &pws=0 to the end of your search results URL, although by Google admission is not persistant and only works for the current query.
You can also drag this link to your bookmarks, quickly click it and it will add that to the end of the URL for you.
- Change Browser
Personally, I tend to double-check results over on Internet Explorer which I never ever use, therefore don’t login to Google with it. I always just head over to IE and perform the same search to check the results. Or (not yet) I could use this in future if I want to make searches that I really don’t want anyone to know about, especially if web history is enabled.
And just to add, if you don’t see the results i.e. personalised results 1 to 10 then your results are probably being served normally. However, I don’t believe that Google show this all the time, especially when click volume history is being used.
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I tend to use multiple browsers also, but as I have to check results in lots of countries / languages the Google Global add on for Firefox is very handy - and this has an option to de-personalise results also (by amending the URL as you describe). A quick right-click and you can check multiple SERPs even with gmail still open in another tab. Red Fly covered their bases when making it.
I was unaware of that plugin Swerveball, thanks for the notice, I’ll check it out
Glenn,
Good info. Thanks for sharing. I’d never thought about that, but certainly will now.
~Jim
I mainly do PPC so I use the adpreview tool as PPC ads react in the same way as the organic SERP - see https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool as far as I’m aware this negates the personalised results effect.
You can also define your location to see results wherever you like e.g. US if you’re UK based etc
Another great tip Hannah, thanks for sharing that
thank you for the information! i had the same problem in the keyword rank of my company when i was log in!
I just use Joost de Valk’s Google UnPersonalised Search toolbar plugin (available for IE and FF):
http://yoast.com/seo-tools/disable-personalized-search-plugin/
Does the job perfectly.
Great post, thanks for the info. I often wondered why I was seeing different rankings to my friends. Now I know.