Is my own website ranking highly for me because of personalized search?

[JS_Harris]

I work on my own website quite often, does that mean that when I do a search for something related to my website I can expect to find my own site ranked well when in fact it's not as well ranked for other people?

How on earth can you optimize something so variable?

And what's with all the videos showing up in natural search, if i wanted to see 8 videos in the top 10 results I'd go to youtube. The topic i'm in has a crowd that likes spending hours looking at videos but I don't, no time...

How can I gauge results in Google for my site when things change so much?

[proboscis]

My websites rank higher for me when I am signed into my google accounts, also if I have been doing lots of searches on google books, I will later get lots of book results in regular search, probably the same if you've been doing a lot with videos.

Do you try signing out of your google accounts and then doing a search?

[Robert Charlton]

...8 videos in the top 10 results...

I myself have never seen 8 out of 10 results coming up as videos. Videos and images generally appear most frequently on celebrity searches. Try searching for various well known female pop singers, eg. Those might show perhaps two videos and one set of images out of 10, not 8 out of 10.

The topic i'm in has a crowd that likes spending hours looking at videos...

I think you've answered your own question. Universal Search tends to take user preferences into account, and if videos are what the "crowd" wants, that's likely to be what the "crowds" will get.

How can I gauge results in Google for my site when things change so much?

You may need to keep up with some of the change. If video results predominate in your field and you're not there, then your site apparently isn't doing well.

[tedster]

There are many variants that make rankings a difficult metric to count on these days.

1. Some data centers use different data sets. Google's load balancing alone can give you changes.
2. Filtered by location (even down to the city or part of city)
3. Different browsers sometimes get different results
4. Personalized search results while logged in
5. Some "personalized" results even when not logged in, such as recent search history and geolocation
6. Rankings that vary time time of day.
7. Presence or absence of various universal search entries - images, news, books, video, maps, products, scholar, knols, etc. These are not always consistently present or absent, depending on the particular query term.

There's probably more that I haven't thought about. The only bright light for a metric at the moment is Google's change to include ranking data in the referer string. [webmasterworld.com]

[nippi]

log out of google

you will see your site's true rankings.

[aakk9999]

... and clear your browser cache once logged out.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

My site appears always on the top when I am signed in.

You just need to log out and at times clear cookies to see the correct results.

[rustybrick]

To turn off personalized results, add &pws=0&hl=all to the end of the URL search string. &pws=0 removes personalized search and &hl=all removes the searchwiki part.

i.e. [google.com...]