Google is just taking the piss now

Make sure you are not logged into google accounts while doing searches for keywords related to your website, this will affect rankings if you have visited your site several times while searching for related keywords or this specific keyword.

Google produced taylored results for individuals with gmail, google related accounts and will push sites you have visited to top positions on the results pages.

Also if you are using chrome this will affect your results in the same way based on stored cookies.

Fwiffo said:

I (personally) budget for:

1st rank 50%
2nd rank 25%
3rd rank 12%
4th rank 6%
5th rank 3%
6th-10 0.5-2%

Keep in mind that you will likely pick up additional traffic from other long tail keywords derived from that term.

From my (personal) experience, real numbers are probably more, however I prefer to budget conservatively and aim to have more lucrative projects

Click to expand...

i don't remember anymore where i read it, but i think it was on some google site explaining those things, that the first 3 search results get 40% of the clicks and the remaining 60% go from the 4th forward(or 60/40, not sure anymore)... so probably you are being over optimistic in those numbers and not budgeting conservatively as you say