A number of times now I’ve met people who tell me that they’re really proud of their ‘number five’ position for a really competitive search term. A couple of months ago it happened and the guy was quite smug. I took a look at his site and thought “there’s no way that bag of crap is number five…”

I was right. When I ran my magic ranking tool it found hum down at number 67, quite a difference.

“But when I search I’m number five!!” he exclaimed.

“I think you’re suffering from personalisation vanity disorder”, I said. I just made the actual condition up but I’ll stick to it seeing as it kinda rolls off the keyboard.

Anyway, people experiencing PVD do so because they are simply using Google a lot to find their website when they search for certain keywords. For example, if I had, say, a website that described the many ways in which I can clear out my septic tank, I could go and start searching by typing in ‘septic tank’. I might find myself down on page seven and I’ll click on it.

Now, Google thinks “hey, he’s found that page so it must be right for him” and out of the goodness of its circuits it begins to bring that particular page up higher in the rankings. You think “yay! I’m doing well” when really you’re only doing well to you.

So, you live under the false assumption that everyone in the world looking for a really top-notch septic tank cleaner dude will be able to find you, but the visits remain low and the phone never rings. You then call up your web designer and say “my site sucks, it’s not converting customers…” And a nasty cycle of blame, counter blame and general nastiness occurs.

What Google’s doing is it is trying to get you the best results for your search and it believes that your site is the best one because you keep clicking on it. But you can fix this disorder (kinda), but simply making sure you are logged out of Gmail or your Google account and clearing down your cookies.

What I do is I use a ‘proxy’ server to make sure I never give Google the chance to get used to me. Works a treat and I always no that the results I get are the real ones, good or bad.

So the moral of this story is this : Don’t rely on the search results you get, they may be completely rubbish.

Public service announcement

If you are affected by any of the items mentioned in this blog, reboot. If it’s still happening, give us a call.