I read an intresting article recently on the ranking of search results querried from a personalized iGoogle home page. The article described how a small business owner had been such a frequent visitor a competitor’s site that when he typed in an appropriate key phrase the competitors site was out ranking his own. However using the same key phrase on a unpersonalized Google search his site outranked his competitor. The clever iGoogle algorithm was assuming because of the multitude of visits he had made to his competitors site it made sense to display it higher up the list.

To illustrate the effect I did a serach using the keyword “counterfeit” to see how our site on “counterfeit detection” faired. As you can imaginge it is a site I visit more frequently than most.

My iGoogle search ranked the site as second while a standard Google search ranked it as third … I got the reult I expected the personalized iGoogle search ranked the site higher then regular Google … not a hugh difference but a difference all the same.

This personalized ranking of sites creates an intresting senario when measuring the success of an internet marketing campaign! Any ideas on the approaches to take?