Gmail Login and reversed rankings

[junilerick]

Hi,

I was reading around as I have been doing awhile when I'm in my information overload insomnia mode and I came across someone's post. Basically what it said that gmail does some "browser hijacking" as it will alter the rankings for a keyword based on your preferences when logged in your gmail account. ie If you're logged into gmail and visit your website through google then it will move up the search results for you.

I got curious and tried it out. While I was logged in gmail I was at #10 for my keyword. When I logged out I was at #1.

WTF?

This simply makes no sense to me and as I am not bright enough to shed light on this phenomenon, I will pass on this responsibility to you warriors.

[mandark]

It does this based on your search history. For example, if you often search for books about weight loss, if you just search "books", it will show you weight loss books. It's not only when you're logged on to your gmail account, it uses your browser history too - the best way to see your "true" ranking is to use an incognito window, which doesn't have access to your browser history (use Google Chrome, click the tools button, then "open new incognito window").

[junilerick]

Originally Posted by mandark

It does this based on your search history. For example, if you often search for books about weight loss, if you just search "books", it will show you weight loss books. It's not only when you're logged on to your gmail account, it uses your browser history too - the best way to see your "true" ranking is to use an incognito window, which doesn't have access to your browser history (use Google Chrome, click the tools button, then "open new incognito window").

Uh.. thanks for the reply but did you really read the post? The top 10 weren't being altered according to a specific category based upon my browsing history, just the ranking of the top 10 jumped around quite a bit. In fact, my site jumped between 1 and 10 but in the reverse of what I thought it would be. And the changes showed up before/after logging in my gmail account, not from deleting browser history, so...