What is search 'personalization' and does it affect ranking results in Local Rank Tracker?

Modern search engines and browsers both track and monitor which sites a person visits, and what they search for. In most cases, they also know where a person is located.

Search engines use these factors to influence the order of search results that are displayed to a person — this means that the order of results can change from person to person. In modern search engines there is no ‘true’ set of search rankings because they differ for every person.

Does personalization affect Local Rank Tracker results?

The Local Rank Tracker tool doesn’t run through your own browser, so it doesn’t inherit your personalization factors, meaning that the results the report shows will differ slightly from what you see in your own browser.

We run all search queries through a large network of IPs. As search engines don’t like automated services such as rank tracker tools (because we don’t click on PPC ads), doing this ensures that they are not detected.

Secondly, we reduce the impact of personalization by cleaning browser settings and passing parameters, which tell the search engines to ignore personalized factors.