Google Toolbar

Most likely one is hitting www1, www2, www3, or www and it has old or new results.

And if you try without the toolbar, all cookies off?

Hmmm, thanks for both of your responses. I thought about the dance but this has been going on since I installed it about two weeks ago. Have we been tangoing that long?

I will uninstall the toolbar and delete the cookie(s) and see what happens from there. Thanks again for your input!

Macguru, I uninstalled the Google Toolbar and deleted all cookies. Guess what? The positions disappeared!

I did test with and without the toolbar and there are totally different results. Sites that I visited when having the toolbar installed were positioned on the first couple of pages with my own site in position #6. When I uninstalled and deleted cookies, those sites moved considerably and my own, well I can't find it yet! (I found it residing in results 41-50 of about 298,000).

Is it possible that those of us with the toolbars installed are seeing results that are not accurate? Here I am thinking that I have these strong positions only to find out that the toolbar may have influenced the results I was seeing.

Any concrete explanations out there?

I think you are seeing either some kind of caching data/proxy or something else. I have never had a settled database differ in PR with other people's ToolBars. I work on several different computers in different locations.

As far as ranking goes - I do sometimes see a difference in position - especially recently. Usually this has to do with indented rankings not being there in some cases. Right now - it appears that google is still not settled - which is unusual - as they WERE settled.

However, when talking on the phone with whoever - and they say - hmm, it is coming up #3 on mine, not #7 - I can usually get the same ranking by having either them or me change to www 2 or 3.

Personally, if it is something that I have monitoring for a time period - I usually consider it a new ranking if it has the same or greater number of results as the previous one. Always look at the number of result given to make sure you are not getting an abridged version of SERP when looking at results. I am much happier and confident with a #1 listing showing 1.2M, than 700K.

If I was looking for "foo" with search preferences in French and all cookies on I would get this URL from Google.

http*://www.google.com/search?q=foo&site=search&hl=fr&output=search

(I disabled the URL with the "*" on purpose for us to read them carefully, instead of clicking on them like mad. ;-) )

Now with all cookies off...

http*://www.google.com/search?hl=fr&q=foo&btnG=Recherche+Google&lr=

Now from opera's search box...

http*://www.google.com/search?q=foo&sourceid=opera&num=10

Finally from IE with the Google bar...

http*://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=foo

SERP accordigly vary.

If I want a plain vanilla search, not wanting Google to mess with my stuff, I would type the following in the adress bar, carefully avoiding Google search box.

http*://www.google.com/search?q=foo

It is all in the URL...