Google now displays search results based on on a number of factors. Your geographic location, your browsing history, how you configured your browser to show the Google SERP – everything comes into play. My cousin was touring Asia a year back and he was shocked when he discovered that his blog at #6 on Google SERP. He was sitting at #2 when he left home. He called me to check his position and guess what he is still at #2. So, what is he doing wrong. Nothing, it’s not his fault Google displays country specific search results and that’s why he was presented with a result which is different from what he is familiar with.

Since USA is one of the major markets ( in fact it’s the biggest ) for online entrepreneurs you would like to check frequently how you are doing on Google.com which is actually the US version of Google. To avoid confusion and get correct results you can follow a few simple steps -

Step 1 : Install the CustomizeGoogle Firefox addon. It will assign a serial number to each of the results in Google SERP. Make sure the Add Position Counter is checked. Tools > Addons > CustomizeGoogle > Web > Add Position Counter

Step 2: Make sure that the “Number of Results” is set to 10 (which is default and most probably you don’t have to do anything unless you have changed it to some other number). You can do this by clicking the Preference link just to the right of the Search button on the Google search page. You need to do this because almost all of your visitors have this setting by default.

Step 3: Type your keyword or key phrase in the search field and hit enter or click the Search button.

Step 4: As Google returns with the search results, you go back to the address bar again and add the following at the end of the url and hit enter again

&gl=us     (if you want US results while you access the internet from  anywhere but USA)
&gl=uk     (if you want UK results while you access the internet from  anywhere but UK)
&gl=ca     (you got the idea …. this one is for Canada)
&gl=au     (Australia)
&gl=nz      (New Zealand)

Here is an example ( keyword searched – acne treatment )

http://www.google.com/search?q=acne+treatment&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&gl=uk

Did you notice the &gl=uk at the end of the url ? I was trying to find out how a site is doing in UK.

By the way, you must sign out of your Gmail account that you might have open in another tab.

This will fetch perfect results every and is a pretty fast process once set up. There are some other addons which are believed to display geo-targeted results but they either show incorrect results or are not as convenient as this.

However, if you want to recheck the result try this site for free – Search Google Position

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.