a single source, nothing corroborates it

Never check your rankings on the office wifi

Search results bend around the connection you are sitting on. A support team repeatedly opening the same help URL was enough for that page to displace the product page for the whole office IP range, while the same query from outside returned the normal result. Assume visit and click data is in the ranking, at the level of whole connections rather than signed-in devices.

The method

1. 01

   Assume Google is using visit, click and engagement data in rankings, and at the level of whole IP connections rather than only for individual signed-in devices.

2. 02

   Never check your own rankings from the office network, because your team's own repeated visits can bend the results you see.

What it returned

• 25

  About 25 of the 150 Seattle staff were support people who repeatedly opened and passed on the same help URL, and that page was the one Google promoted for the office IP range. Fishkin points to repeatable query and click experiments, engagement-data patent filings and talks by Google engineers as corroboration.

• A search for Keyword Explorer from Moz's Seattle office showed only the help hub page, with the product page and its sitelinks gone, on every device on that wifi. Outside the office the product page ranked first, and the VPN, running on a separate connection, also showed the normal result.

Sources

• A Case Study in Google's Use of Visit & Click DataRand Fishkin · sparktoro.com · 2017-06-30