People, people, people. Google will lie to you.
When you are signed to a Google account, your personal tendencies will "flavor" the results.
If you look at a site many times, Google will raise the ranking for that site when you search because it thinks the site has relevance to you for your search.
I built a local handyman site. Good site, many pages, quality content, did everything right.
As usual, I spent a week tweaking, and it looked pretty good.
MS told me it was # 17 in Google, so I massaged it a little.
Then one day I got up and checked the site, and lo and behold, number 1 spot in Google for "Houston handyman". Man I was thrilled, am I a SEO God or what? One month old site on top of Google beating out all very well established contenders!! Woohoo!!
I shot the owner a really fabulous e-mail telling him the good news.
Only, funny thing, when he searched for it in Houston (like I did), the site was at 15.
I did not understand this (this was about two years ago). I asked around. No one had a clue.
I have more than one Google account and I signed out of one account to sign into another. For whatever reason, I did a search on my handyman keyword, and lo and behold, right there at 15. I signed into my main account, lo and behold, spot 1 on the first page. I signed out and signed into one of my other gmail accounts, and sure enough, spot 15.
I don't know if anyone else has seen it, but Google decided that since I spent so much time there, that site had value to me and elevated it in MY SERPs, but only when I was signed in.
MS told me it was 15 when I checked as I should have done before I sent the good news. I verify all rankings thru MS before I run my big fat mouth now. That was embarrassing.
Google + is going to make it worse.
