#4 in SERPs for a huge k/w phrase but no hits

[miozio]

I have recently been looking for my site positions in Google and found it on spot #4 for a two word combination that looked very competitive. Performed a thourogh research on it and it really apeared to be a popular search tirm. I disabled the personalized search of course, so the position 4 is correct. The first 4 sites don't seem to be that huge and are on the same level as mine (well established). I am saying that i get 0 visits on that term. I've been in SEO for 5 years not but such a thing looks strange....

[tedster]

Hello miozio, and welcome to the forums.

It seems that the results you see are not the result that most people are seeing. There are several possible reasons for this, including geo-location - but a likely one is that you are seeing results that are personalized for you, based on your history.

We're discussing this in another thread [webmasterworld.com]. Earlier this month Google began serving personalized results - even when the user is not logged in to any Google account.

It can happen with a short but frequently entered search phrase that a much lower number of users actually click on any result at all. Instead that first set of search results gives them an idea of how to refine the query -- and they make that new search. For some query terms this happens more than 50% of the time, and that can account for a major difference between reported search volumes and actual traffic.

However, seeing absolutely zero traffic for a #4 suggests that something other than that is going on. Just thought I'd mention it as a possibility.

[internetheaven]

Could just be this:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I've been seeing zero traffic from top 10 rankings on many terms and many pages.

miozio: are you actually the 4th clickable link in the list or are there adverts, news alerts, images, youtube videos etc. etc. above you?

[piatkow]

are you actually the 4th clickable link

One of my sites is at number 2 for a key search term, that is now putting it below the fold as there is so much rubbish above the results.

My general experience is that the search terms that I imagined would be vital produce little or now hits and the ones that I never expected keep cropping up all the time.

[miozio]

I know about personalized search, so i disabled my web history, you know you can do that. I am actually #4 most of the time and time after time there are Ads on top

[CainIV]

Sometimes using a proxy to emulate results in other areas of the US can reveal alot about how much your positioning does change.

I am up here in Vancouver, Canada, and using google.com of course the results are drastically different.