Dan Nedelko : Internet Marketer

Updated: After much complaining I've pulled the headers out of the post body and inserted them into separate text files to clean up the actual posting, I also updated the files to include the same search terms (oops)

* Note to readers: I'm kinda busy at the moment and have not had a chance to edit the server logs for changes to the headers to make them more readable you'll have to pour through them yourself for the time being *

As I'm going through a normal morning of analytics and such I've noticed an ongoing trend which I don't particularly understand. As most of you know when you are looking at optimizing across search engines quite frequently you are forced to reverse engineer (which is in fact not the correct term) mainly you're forced to observe and figure out what consistently is achieving the rankings in the search engine in question.

This doesn't apply to blackhat tricks or techniques I am referring to the weighting of a certain factor over the weighting of another factor. Frequently this will change on the side of the search provider given the amount of search engine spamming going on at the particular moment in time, and new technologies which may become significant such as the amount of weight to technologies such as RSS feeds.

Now this is all fine and good, if you work in search marketing game you adapt quickly and pay alot of attention to shifts in the technologies. At times Google, Yahoo, MSN will make decisions which could be somewhat debatable (which are never open to debate).

On occassion Matt Cutts, The Google Blog, Yahoo Blog or MSN Blog will address these issues or at the very leaast explain the reasoning behind various criteria decisions and though one might not agree we are collectively forced to adapt and react.

So here I am going to present two screenshots search term used is «sports», one from my Mac Powerbook using Firefox 1.5.0.4 and one from my Windows based Dell Lattitude Laptop using Firefox 1.5.0.4 - as you can see for a number of terms Google is producing very different SERP's based on the operating system of the client machine.

I would love to see this addressed or at least explained. I can't for the life of me think why a Mac user would require different results based on the platform versus the results delivered to Windows user. Even though Mac users are better looking, smarter, funnier and generally just cooler all around

I'm also attaching the a live header dialogue between the machine in question and google during the search results. I definitley question and debate the validity of SERPs from an update (especially MSN's and Yahoo's latest horrible updates - another article coming on that very soon) but I am perplexed as to how this increases the relevance of a search...

So I'm going to throw this one out to the general community at large, specifically anyone from Google who might like to address this, and in all likelihood if anyone were to respond then I assume it would be Matt Cutts. So I'll wait.

Mac Powerbook Header - Sports

Windows Dell Header - Sports