Ranking – A Detailed Anatomy

Ranking is the part with which a user interacts and an SEO works for that is why it is quite special. This article will cover following as aspects

• What is Ranking?
• How does It Work?
• How Personalised Search Affects user search results?
• Effects of Personalised Search Results On SEO

Ranking is the third and final stage of Google Search. After indexing Google reverts the user with relevant search results and the final search result page appears like this

Sponsored results are known as PPC and other one falls under the category of generic search results.

How it works

After a user enters a query in “search bar” Google then scrutinize its index for the web pages that appear relevant with the search phrase. Found relevant pages are then scored and ranked according to following components, but not limited to. After this phase results are sorted & shown to the user. This whole process takes place in a couple of seconds.

Above are the aspects that Google bots utilize to rank the web pages and we will elaborate them in depth as well as other aspects in our further article series.

The rapid advancements in Google bots have made them capable enough to judge the user’s experience on a particular website. For example, if a user opens a website from SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and after spending couple of seconds comes back to SERP again and jumps on another website it means user did not find the media he was looking for on the first visited website which is considered as a bad user experience.

Personalisation
Search engines strictly lay down their focus on conferring relevant search results and they utilize user’s browser cookies as well as Gmail search history and these results are known as personalized search results. This is just to enhance search results as much as possible.

Google itself has been encouraging search results based on the history of user behavior from a very long time. Google introduced personalised search results in 2005 and things were changed from there on.

Let us elaborate it with an example

If you have logged into your Google account and then search for a desired phrase the search results will appear based on the history of your searches, such as websites you visit often will appear on higher rank, but on the other hand, if someone searches for the same phrase without their without their Google account logged-in their results would differ from yours.

Have a glimpse of your web history stored at Google server

Now let’s have a look at another case where you have not logged in into your Google account at this point Google will look for cookies and history stored in your web browser this was a huge change and announced by Google in year 2009.

Effects of Personalised Search Results on SEO

Personalised searches have not only affected the user results, but also working methodologies of SEO as well, following are major affects in SEOs sphere.

Ranking Check is Less Accurate

As due to personalised results you might not get the search results as same as your client is getting in different country, this poses a barrier to SEOs working on the international projects.

Deceptive Results

The websites get often visit by the user will always get the benefit as it will appear higher on rank on his/her computer screen, despite of the fact that other competitors are much efficient from them.

Storing Emphasis on User Experience and Branding

It was already difficult to make visitors believe how good a client’s brand & service is and now SEOs have to deal with personalised search as well, no matter how good your website is, you might be getting surpassed by previously visited websites.

Note: Always use clean browser (Delete history, cookies, cache) before checking website’s ranking.

In 2012 Google announced took a big step towards social networking and introduced Google Plus and we started watching a difference in search results for example

As shown in the pictures Gianluca Fiorelli have +1’d these and this is appearing to us because we have our Google account logged in and Gianluca is in our circle and this new search amendment was referred to as “search plus” Google even pushed images posted by a user’s friends at the time of the general image search.

From this point on we will be diving in the technical aspects of search engine optimization, How search engine algorithm works?.