What is my SERP?

Recently, we started a campaign to move our client higher on google search engine results.

When we started, his google search engine position was 245 for Keyword 1 . Not a very enviable position to be at all. We start on a mixture of activities, from redefining his page title, to getting links back to his site. At the same time we started monitoring his SERP (Search Engine Rank Position).

After one week, he had already moved up to position 102. We thought a remarkable advancement in such a short period of time. A week after that he moved to position 75, so we now knew we were on the right track, but would he drop back down? Now we were starting to see some of the linkbacks starting to kick in by checking his backlinks with yahoo.

After the third week and a 10% increase in backlinks, he moved up to position 52. Nice. but what was very strange, was when we looked at google webmaster tools (for the same keywood 1, it listed him at position 9! When you actually did a search, he still showed up in position 52, and when we use other SERP tools, he comes up in position 52. So he was really in position 52? Right? Wrong! A few days later when did an actual search of his keywood 1, he was in position 2! WOW Was this right? Wrong! It turns out I was logged into google webmaster tools. For some strange reason, if you are logged into google webmaster tools, you will get a false reading when doing searches. After logging out, my serp results yielded a positon of 49.

So what gives? Why different SERP results:

google webmaster tools: 9
Actual search results: 49
SERP Tools: 52

Is google forcasting future results? or is that just my wishful thinking?

By: Nick the SEO guy