Sometimes we wonder how Google knows what particular interests we have. Here is why.
Lately I have been quite interested in fitness and healthy nutrition. So I was googling a bit to learn something on the topic and clicking on certain pages I found the most interesting. A few days later I noticed that the ads I got on most of the websites I was browsing through had related topics to fitness, muscle gain, and so on.
This is a fact that happens constantly to all of us, especially when we use Google to search throughout the web.
So I started making tests to try to find out if the results I was getting were influenced by search engines, especially Google.
I also must say that I work as an SEO Marketer and one of the things I use to search for are my clients’ keywords in order to see their ranking. So therefore it is important to me to know if the results I am getting are accurate.
Next test I did was with a hotel I made a website for. So I typed in the desired keywords every day during a few weeks to see the results and after that time suddenly this specific client of mine got right to to top of the 1st site.So, to get to the point of this article, I can confirm that when I was searching for terms related to muscle gain, and especially one of a famous bodybuilder, I found out that his particular site always got first place!
Isn’t that strange? I wasn’t sure if it was right because the jump had happened from position 16 the day before to #1 a day after…
The Solution
If Google is tracking my search queries even if I’m not logged in my account, that means they are tracking my IP. So I tested resetting my Internet access in order to obtain a new IP. And voila! search results are back to normal. But only for one day! next day I had the same results. So I finally got to the conclusion that location is also being tracked!
This is especially interesting if you are interested in browsing privately, as private mode of different browsers (I use all of them) only erase your browsing history but will sill keep telling search engines who you are (your IP and location).
Hope this information was helpful to you the next time you want to know if Google is playing tricks on you.
