Strange SERP on generic keyword

[kristian]

Hi.
I'm doing a SEO project for a danish jobboard, their primary keyword is job and I have managed to place the site as #1 a couple of times on google.dk (world-wide search).

My question is; when my site is not #1 I'm usually in the top 5 and my biggest competitor is #1, but when I'm #1 my competitor is not in the top 5. How can that be? How can the SERP be so different?

[incrediblehelp]

This is always going to be the case. Sometimes when you check a ranking you may be checking on one Google datacenter and then tomorrow when you check you could be looking at another one all together.

Google has different datacenters to help load balance all the searches that they have. They also a prone to testing different algorithms or other nasty things on some of them which can further differentiate the results.

Going forward you will see more personalized and regionalized results which will even further distort what I may see in Ohio and someone else may see in New York.

if you sign up fro Google sitemaps, Google offers a stat section where you can see the average ranking fro some of your most popular keywords that your website gets impression and clicks on.