Webiste Ranking Differently Based on IP/Data Center
-
I have a site which I thought was ranking well, however that doesn't seem to be the case.
When I check the site from different IPs within the US it shows that the site is on page 1 and on other IPs it shows that it's on page 5 and for some keywords it shows it's not listed.
This site was ranking well, before but I think google dropped it when I was giving putting in too much work with it (articles and press releases), but now it seems to have recovered when I check with my IP, but on other data centers it still shows it prior to recovering.
It was able to recover after not building links to for a period of time, it showed it moved back up from the data center I'm connected to, but it still shows the possibly penalized results on other data centers.
Is it possible that site is still penalized?
So the question is why does it show it recovered in some data centers and not others?
How do I fix this?
It's been about 2 months since it's recovered from some data centers. Is this site still penalized or what's going on?
There are no warnings in web master tools.
Any insights would be appreciated!
This isn't an issue with the rank tracking software, I've tested this on a multitude of IPs with varying differences.
Thanks!
-
Linkdex and also authority labs now offer you the opportunity to see different georankings.
Said that, none seems having answered about why a site ranks differently in every location.
The answer is quite simple: personalization and geotargeting of the users. That means that Google tends to present to the users sites that it considers will be more useful also from a geographical perspective.
This is blatantly evident in case of hotel or local businesses, but it is applied also to site which, at first, may seem not having a real dependency over geotargeting. Why? Let's take SEO companies. If you are doing a search for "SEO Services" a neutral search will show you this, but if I do a not neutral search, Google start showing to me, who I live in Spain, SEO sites from the UK, which are maybe more interesting for me as they are closer to me geographically and about in the same timezone.
-
Hi A A,
I generally use GeoRanker.com to get this information. It's got a fairly generous full-featured free version, and lets you target countries and cities and compare the first page results. It's quite useful for comparing differing results between cities.
If you're looking for multiple keyword tracking in the top 100, your best best is to use something like Rank Tracker or AWR and use proxies located in the same country as the ccTLD you're searching (i.e. use UK proxies for google.co.uk). You can automate this to an extent in Rank Tracker (in Preferences > Proxy Rotation).
Hope that helps!
-
most of my clients are in different cities, but I've never seen the rankings vary as much as this.
Just wondering if there was an answer to this or if I should suggest to start over again, with the client if the site is penalized, he won't be happy with this for sure.
Also wondering if there was a way to see if the site is penalized, but it makes no sense for it to be penalized in some data centers but not others.
Also it's very frustrating dealing with clients all the time as well, so you may have the ideal position working inhouse
-
Thanks AA
Yes, this explains a lot. I am an in house SEO in the USA. I don't have a need (yet) for this kind of thing. Quite frankly, if I got to the point where I really needed this, I might consider handing off the client to someone in a more relevant local or out-sourcing to someone in their local.
I think the ability to be able to check via tools like HMA has a limited horizon and that one can't build a business that relies on the ability to check rankings in this manner. Just my two cents, and I'm certainly not saying I am an authority on this particular subject.
the topic has been fascinating to me!
-
Hi Dana and JDP,
I use hide my ass (aff link removed by staff) has pretty good service checking from different locations.
I needed this because I have clients in different location so I needed to find proxies within their location, and found out that the results they see are drastically different from my own and also from different IP addresses in this situation. I have others where the results vary but not by the same margin.
Any help or ideas of what I should do would be appreciated. Thank you!
-
Hello A A,
Your post got me paranoid and I went around to all the different online tools that will check rankings from different data centers like http://dccheck.com/ . I got a wide variety of responses from these tools and it made me wonder if they worked at all. I also don't have any hard answers for you and it sounds like you may have had some trouble in the past;however it is possible you are freaking out about nothing. Is your traffic stable? You could check google analytics and filter for search traffic then your keywords. From there go and check the geographic map the traffic is coming from. Compare a current time period this way to a past time period when you know you were ranking well. It it is not too different, maybe there is nothing to worry about. Does that help?
-
Hi A A, I'm sorry I am not posting with a really good answer to your question, but instead I have questions. How are you checking your rankings from multiple data centers? I have been doing SEO professionally for a long time (8 years), but there's certainly a lot I don't know.
How does one check one's rankings from a multitude of data centers? Is this really necessary in the US?
I understand that different regions might show different results even to Google users who aren't logged in to Google, based on their geographic location. But, I haven't ever heard of drastic changes in rankings from one data center to another unless it was for a location-specific Website.
Sorry to answer your question with a question, but I am just really curious about this. Thanks!
Dana
P.S. I am currently using SEOMoz Pro, WebPosition.com, Rank Tracker (sporadically) and AWR....but am not aware that you can set any of these up to search from different data centers?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Rank product pages
What are the best ways to rank your product pages, We have a few ecommerce sites and we want to increase the position of both our product and catagory pages. I know that gaining more popularity will help to increase the DA but I want my product pages to rank higher.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Google admits it can take up to a year to refresh/recover your site after it is revoked from Penguin!
I found myself in an impossible situation where I was getting information from various people that seem to be "know it all's" but everything in my heart was telling me they were wrong when it came to the issues my site was having. I have been on a few Google Webmaster Hangouts and found many answers to questions I thought had caused my Penguin Penalty. After taking much of the advice, I submitted my Reconsideration Request for the 9th time (might have been more) and finally got the "revoke" I was waiting for on the 28th of MAY. What was frustrating was on May 22nd there was a Penguin refresh. This as far as I knew was what was needed to get your site back up in the organic SERPS. My Disavow had been submitted in February and only had a handful of links missing between this time and the time we received the revoke. We patiently waited for the next penguin refresh with the surety that we were heading in the right direction by John Mueller from Google (btw.. John is a great guy and really tries to help where he can). The next update came on October 4th and our rankings actually got worse! I spoke with John and he was a little surprised but did not go into any detail. At this point you have to start to wonder WHAT exactly is wrong with the website. Is this where I should rank? Is there a much deeper Panda issue. We were on the verge of removing almost all content from the site or even changing domains despite the fact that it was our brand name. I then created a tool that checked the dates of every last cached date of each link we had in our disavow file. The thought process was that Google had not re-crawled all the links and so they were not factored into the last refresh. This proved to be incorrect,all the links had been re-cached August and September. Nothing earlier than that,which would indicate a problem that they had not been cached in time. i spoke to many so called experts who all said the issue was that we had very few good links left,content issues etc.. Blah Blah Blah, heard it all before and been in this game since the late 90's, the site could not rank this badly unless there was an actual penalty as spam site ranked above us for most of our keywords. So just as we were about to demolish the site I asked John Mueller one more time if he could take a look at the site, this time he actually took the time to investigate,which was very kind of him. he came back to me in a Google Hangout in late December, what he said to me was both disturbing and a relief at the same time. the site STILL had a penguin penalty despite the disavow file being submitted in February over 10 months ago! And the revoke in May. I wrote this to give everyone here that has an authoritative site or just an old one, hope that not all is lots just yet if you are still waiting to recover in Google. My site is 10 years old and is one of the leaders in its industry. Sites that are only a few years old and have had unnatural link building penalties have recovered much faster in this industry which I find ridiculous as most of the time the older authoritative sites are the big trustworthy brands. This explains why Google SERPS have been so poor for the last year. The big sites take much longer to recover from penalties letting the smaller lest trustworthy sites prevail. I hope to see my site recover in the next Penguin refresh with the comfort of knowing that my site currently is still being held back by the Google Penguin Penalty refresh situation. Please feel free to comment below on anything you think is relevant.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Article pages not ranking as well as they should
Hello, Our articles here are not ranking as strongly as they should. Could you take a look and tell me why? When I search for the exact article title we do not come up. We used to. Note our sitewide footer links to some articles in case that's the problem, but even articles not in the footer links aren't performing.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Index page de-indexed / banned ?
Yesterday google removed our index page from the results. Today they also removed language subdomains (fr.domain.com).. Index page, subdomains are not indexed anymore. Any suggestions? -- No messages in GWT. No malware. Backlink diversification was started in May. Never penguilized or pandalized. Last week had the record of all times of daily UV. Other pages still indexed and driving traffic, left around 40% of total. Never used any black SEO tool. 95% of backlinks are related; sidebar, footer links No changes made of index page for couple months.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bele0 -
750,000 pv/month due to webspam. What to do?
Let's say your user-generated content strategy is wildly successful, in a slightly twisted sense: webspammers fill it with online streaming sports teasers and the promise of "Weeds season 7 episode 11." As a result of hard SEO work done to build the profile of the domain, these webspam pages seem to rank well in Google, and deliver nearly 750k pageviews, and many many unique visitors, to the site every month. The ad-sales team loves the traffic boost. Overall traffic, uniques, and search numbers look rosy. What do you do? a) let it ride b) throw away roughly half your search traffic overnight by deleting all the spam and tightening the controls to prevent spammers from continuing to abuse the site There are middle-ground solutions, like using NOINDEX more liberally on UGC pages, but the end result is the same as option (b) even if it takes longer to get there.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcglynn0 -
What happened with Hayneedle's rankings?
Hayneedle is an e-commerce company that operates 200 niche sites selling indoor and outdoor home products. They were ranking at the top of the first page for most terms related to their sites (fire pits, fountains, benches, etc.), but all of a sudden at the end of April they lost their rankings, getting dropped to page 4 or lower for tons of their sites (barstools.com, patiofurnitureusa.com, adirondackchairs.com, benches.com, etc.). Does anybody know what caused this? Other than one thread on an SEO forum, we haven't been able to find any discussion about it online. It seems like cross-linking between the sites could have been a problem here, but we'd love to hear thoughts from the experts here on this. Our company is using the same business model of one brand with niche sites and we want to avoid anything like this happening to us.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | outdoorliving0 -
Ranking questions
We have questions about our ranking and would like some advice.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whiteflash0