Today my client and I were looking how he ranked in Google. On my computer in Portland Oregon, he was #4. On his computer in Denver, Colorado, he was 3 to 4 pages down for the exact same search term.

I am mystified by this. Any ideas why it would be different?

Are either one of you logged in to Google while searching? personalized results...

Also, sometimes geo location changes the results.

Yes, I was logged in and we were searching for his key phrase for Colorado. He is in Colorado and I am not.

I still find it strange that these would affect the search results.

Thanks for the input.

What rustybrick is saying is that, if you're logged in to your Google account, Google is likely giving you personalized results. So, if you've looked at this query before and clicked on your client's listing, the personalized results will bring it up higher in your SERPs than it might appear for someone else -- including your client.

Look in the upper right of the page for a link that says "Turn OFF personalized results for this search" and see if that changes anything. It might, or might not.

Another issue could be that you were tapping into different data centers when you searched.

Another issue could be -- if the query had a local element to it -- that one of you was getting geo-targeted SERPs based on IP address or some such thing. (Though admittedly, in this case I'd expect him to see the higher ranking in Colorado, not you.)

Generally speaking, though, what you describe is not all that uncommon. But it's usually not 3-4 pages different, at least in my experience.

Thanks. Your explanations are very helpful.

I noticed after I logged out, my client's page dropped down 3 pages.

I face the same problem. From the same LAN (all computers access Internet through proxy) 2 PC's get different results with the same search term. No Pc has logged in Google. I tried it with 24 PC's. There were only two diferrent results.Can you tell me why is this happening?

Google has different datacenters, which aren't all the exact same. During peak usage periods, you could get different results on same computer one search after the other for same search term... due to load balancing.