Random search results?

[mikomido]

I have been stalking the visitors of my site a while now, constantly going to the exact referrer URLs, often SERPs. However, sometimes my site doesn't show up in that list. How can this be? Do search engines serve different SERPS to different people?

[mikomido]

Why doesn't anyone ever respond around here?

[dickbaker]

Traffic to this forum is very light on the weekends, especially holiday weekends.

If your site is fairly new, it may be ranking on some search engine's datacenters, but not on all of them. So, depending upon which datacenter is delivering up the results, your site may or may not show up.

[CWebguy]

You are stalking your visitors? That can't be good for business :(

[piatkow]

Issues may include different results at different data centres and geo targetting of search results. There are so many variables.

[callivert]

yes, different people get different SERPs. There are lots of reasons.

First, different geo areas get sites hosted in their geo area - or sites with their country extension - weighted higher. If you're in Canada, you'll see more Canadian sites, for example.
Second, if you have the toolbar installed and a google account, you'll get personalized search- totally tailored to your previous browsing/searching history;
Third, changes in the SERP algorithm, could cause subtle (or not so subtle) changes from one week to the next. For example, rumor has it that directories are being weighted down at the moment;
Forth, different datacenters - Google's data outposts that provide everything so quickly and efficiently - can have different information in them, especially if there are rolling changes throughout the network;
Fifth, people can have different settings and preferences on their search such as different filtering levels. People can have different sites excluded because of local or network firewalls;
And finally, the web is constantly changing: sites, pages, content, links, are all in a state of flux. Therefore, even if everything else was held constant, the SERPs would still change.

[dickbaker]

callivert speaks the truth.

Do a search for Google datacenter. You'll find at least one site where you can search all of the datacenters for your particular keywords.

It isn't just new sites that drop from the results. My three year-old site has page on page one for hundreds of terms for over two years. Today I checked one particular phrase, and I found that I was #1 on many datacenters, but not even on the first page on other datacenters.

Have patience. If you've done a good job of SEO'ing your site, you'll be back in the results again.