Google ranking little lies!
For the last 3 months, I've been watching my rankings by searching for the keywords I use on Google and always had a nice surprise. My website pages didn't rank on the first, second, third, forth, etc. but my Google+ account did! I share all the posts I write through my Google+ account. They were showing up on the second and third place on the first page! I was so thrilled thinking that at least these would make my post visible for 100 of searches each month. I wasn't yelling in the desert or so I thought...
I ran into problems with WordPress administrative page. I couldn't see my post's text and the button bar disappeared. I decided to delete my cache, my cookies and history. It didn't fix the problem completely, but I found a way around when this problem occurs so it's not too bad.
Since I deleted the cache I don't see my Google+ account ranking high anymore. Actually it's not ranking at all!
The thing is It never ranked high for anyone else but me. The fact that you search often for a specific website will raise its rank in Google because of the cookies locally on your computer. I knew that but just didn't think it would do the same for my Google + account... How naive of me because now that I think about it, it makes sens.
So the good side of it is that I learned something more about SEO :-)
Recent Comments
21
Yeh, that happened to me Carolyn. I was showing my friend my website and saw that it came up straight away in google rankings. She explained that I needed to clear all history and that it ranked high on my ipad because I tap into it a lot. When I deleted all history - I was no longer ranked : (. Another friend shared this link with me to see where about my website comes in ranking: serplab.com It's free software. It was an eye opener. It showed me that one of my posts is 88th in ranking. Not good, but specific. Showed me that I needed to do a lot more work .
Thanks Clarie, this is disappointing but at least I learned about it sooner rather than later :-) Thanks for the link
A cloud with a silver lining.... it's nice that you found a positive in all of this. best wishes
Thanks pinns. It's even more positive now that I blogged about it :-) Many people provided very useful information to start improving. I love this community :-)
Yes. This is what happens when you do not search for your keywords correctly. If you use Chrome you need to be in Incognito Mode, Firefox in Private Browsing, or to make things easier you can just use the Free SEO Page Ranker tool that Jewel posted yesterday in her blog. I use it all the time and it is as accurate as Incognito Mode, see link below.
http://whatpageofsearchamion.com
Very good link, thanks for this Robert! It will save me lots of time going through endless pages!
You are welcome. I use it all the time and it is as accurate as if you were to go into Google Incognito Mode, but it is simpler and quicker to get results.
This was normal. That is why you always do incognito search, three-bar tab in the upper right corner in your browser.
Thanks Jovo! I didn't know I could do this. I'll do this from now on... Is it too early (3-4 months that the website is up) to expect the rankings to go up? I wrote around 30 posts and I'm writing in average 2 posts a week. What do you think?
No it is not too early. You search for every specific keyword used for various posts and you will find at least some of them. With some good long-tail keywords I was able to see my ranking within a couple of weeks.
Thanks. I'm gona make some changes to my keywords to use more long-tail keywords... weird, I thought they were pretty long already about 4 to 5 words...?
Thanks Jovo for the insight. Maybe you should write a quick blog so that everybody knows about this tip.
Cheers, Sandi
Hmm you should be ranked on some keywords by now. What SEO plugin are you using? I really like Yoast because it provides an one-page SEO score with a very detailed report. Also you're going after very low competition keywords (like around 50 QSR).
Thanks Stephane! I don't know about Yoast, is it free? I'm currently using the free WA keyword tool... I'm starting to wonder if it's providing accurate information
Oh what a pity!
Chin Up, its for sure an invaluable lesson for you and through sharing for all of us - Thanks.
Cheers, Kay
Thanks Kay. Jovo has provided a nice trick here with Chrome. My browser is in French but it should be something like "private navigation"
See more comments
A valuable lesson learned! :)