Google Personalization even when Logged out?

[Ummon]

I have been seeing a very weird thing lately. I got a heavily penalized site from the January scraper update. I use google chrome but they mess around with the google searches so I use firefox to track the "natural" search. Now I am completely logged out of google and I search "widget" and I appear on first entry on page 2 which knowing the traffic from this keyword I know cannot be.

So I fire up explorer that I use rarely do the same searched (logged out of google) and lo and behold I am on page 31. I though Personalization is only active when one is logged into google.

I have tried it multiple times for two days now and get the exact same results.

[Robert Charlton]

Try flushing your cookies on Firefox.

Google is pretty aggressive about tracking search history unless you opt out of it, but you need to be logged in so you can opt out. (That actually makes sense, though it seems paradoxical).

If you're not opted out, it appears to me that Google will create a history for a particular browser's cookies.

[Planet13]

Also, you might want to give this thread a read through,

[webmasterworld.com...]

Hope this helps.