Google tests a “you visit often” tag with personal results

Testing your results is going up have to go back to private and incognito mode, as Google points out the obvious with sites you visit often.

One of the chores of every SEO is monitoring your SERPs. Specifically, it’s the regular and routine checking of your positions on Search Engine Results Page. It’s just something you do day in and day out, even if you have position trackers working for you.

Doing this is just part of an SEOs life. It’s just what you do.

You can do it in your regular browsing mode or in a private/incognito mode for an experience more like “any old user”, but in recent times, they’ve often been aligned.

But that might be changing.

This week, this SEO has found something he’s not seen before: a label specifically pointing out that you visit this site often.

In a search for a music service review (to see where my site Pickr lands), Google flagged that “you visit often”, moving that position to the top of the list in my regular browsing, compared to where it was for everyone via incognito mode in position three. That’s a pretty sizeable difference.

It’s a semi-expected change, that said, thanks in part to some changes Google has hinted were coming a few weeks ago in mid-November. Announced alongside the November 2023 Core Update, personalised search would be arriving with the ability to follow sites and through the engine’s recognition of sites that you visit.

For regular people, it means that sites you visit more often from searching will display in a personalised ranking system, and for SEOs, it probably means it’s back to regular monitoring using private browsing tabs. One wonders how this will work with rank trackers.