Ranking 4th for Poker - wtf?

[Mr-AJ]

Well it's not a bad surprise when you wake up and find your site behind Pokerstars, Pokerlistings and Wikipedia for the term "poker". It's not a new site (2007) so I don't expect any sandbagging or stuff like that. And I did not make any major changes. It's a very content rich community site with a good backlink profile but it usually ranks on 4th page. I can't explain that and never saw it before.
Any thoughts on this? Is it possible that some Google changes took place and favored my site heavily (brand, loading time and all the rumors)?

[themike537]

Probably just a temporary blip. I've experienced huge jumps before (when I hadn't done anything to deserve the increased ranking) and then saw my site return to its original place a few hours later.

[Josh]

I'm seeing the typical sites for that term. Perhaps you have used one of their customization features and it is ranking your site well just for your personal searches? This happens to me when I am logged into a Google account. Signing off usually puts the serps back to normal.

[Trikkur]

Yea, this happens to me a lot from personal search and I'm pretty sure I've seen it after I logged out before. Since I used firefox, I got the addon "IE View" which lets me view the page in Internet Explorer so I'll use that and see "corrected results".

[Mr-AJ]

Well, I never Google while logged in. I also checked it out in IE and it shows a different ranking which is pretty odd except for the case that logging out is not enough any more (I remember Michael Martinez talking about this earlier).
Just checked G Analytics and it shows an increase of 300 % with the current incomplete stats (which are always incomplete at 00:00 am).
Maybe this is an indication that it's not just me seing improvements.
Right now I think that it's a "temporary blip".

[321]

It's Google's new personalized search.
IMPORTANT! READ THIS: Google just screwed your ranking reports

I see nothing unusual in the top 10.

poker - Google Search
Upper right, click "web history", then click disable customizations, then search again.

[RayUK]

Question: if you go through a website such as

Page rank checker SEO SERP web tools: Google Top 1000 SERPs checker: results many countries Google Pagerank SERPs index results web SEO tools

which is an automated SERPs checker thing. Well not automated but you get what I mean. Does this help stop the problems with personal search and so on? That is, give a better neutral estimate of SERPs position, since it is a website doing the searching and not an individual?

[pokeraussie]

did the ranking stick? how much daily traffic was the keyword "poker" getting?

[Turtleknife]

Yeah when you see something that's too good to be true, it is. If you really ranked for the keyword POKER, you would have been approached by CNN for a story. Google search places that high in YOUR results because you have been to that site 1,000s of times.

When you want real results, use something like Scroogle Scraper that will give raw results, not based on your history or GEO location.

[GFPC]

thats awesome...

thanks for that info!!! i love it!

Yeah when you see something that's too good to be true, it is. If you really ranked for the keyword POKER, you would have been approached by CNN for a story. Google search places that high in YOUR results because you have been to that site 1,000s of times.

When you want real results, use something like Scroogle Scraper that will give raw results, not based on your history or GEO location.