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
-
Is buying traffic from Internet traffic club harmful to rankings
From looking at one of our clients’ GA stats, we’ve discovered that they have signed up with a site called Internet Traffic Club (or they have asked someone to do it on their behalf). Their hits on one day went from a fairly standard low number to a few thousand. The hits came from cities all over the world, yet this client is a local UK solicitor offering a local town service. We feel doing this - if they do it regularly - would be harmful rather than beneficial to their rankings. Has anyone here any experience of using these traffic buying services and how Google views these hits? Of course it is also nonsensical to pay to buy traffic from Nigeria if you’re a local solicitor, but I want to explain to them the evidence behind the harmful effect it could have on their rankings.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
One guy using some Alexa rank tricks to gain high PR etc..?
Hi! One finnish guy is getting pretty nice Alexa ranking to his sites, even if the real traffic is not somewhere near it would lead for that cool Alexa rank. I am a bit suspisious if he is using some Low Bounce Rate High Traffic Boosters on his sites.. I will give you some examples here to look into.. Vihjepaikka(dot)com - Created on 2013-03-13 - Alexa Rank 129k!!! - PR3 - Backlinks not many qualitys.. Casinolla(dot)net - Created on 2014-10-15 - Alexa Rank 351k!!! - PR0 - Backlinks 0!!! Cashadvance777(dot)com - Created on 2014-09-04 - Alexa Rank 772k!!! - PR3 - Backlinks 0!!! Let me know your thoughts on these.. Cheers!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kononen0 -
What are legit ways to raise up you're ranking for a new website?
I have a wallpaper website that i just made and bought a template that looks fine for the site so far for a month now, and i wanted to know what steps i cant take to better rank my site and build some traffic along the way. I use only specific directories, not sure how to get a press release done and also link back to other sites from pages that get a decent amount of traffic where i can leave a link to it, of course not leaving any type of spammy looking comments. This is the site i am working on right now, freehdwallpapers.be I have linked back from a few sites already, i look at the alexa rank if it will show a number at one point, the sites worth is still pretty low, and also i have added social networks on the site which has gained a number of followers to this day, so i got work to do still. I just don't want to go on about it the wrong way and get penalized by google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 1080HDWallpapers0 -
Main keyword decline in SERPs ranking :-(
Hi Moz, My very humble attempts at SEO has been doing very well for over a year with the keyword phrase 'vintage chanel bags'. Recently, about 3-4 months ago I noticed it dropped from rank 1 to rank 5. I've slowly but steadily been building up more social marketing interaction (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram mostly), brand awareness in company is increasing more searches for 'Vintage Heirloom', great in-links from reputable companies & bloggers. What I'm confused about is that one of our competitors Rewindvintage now appears as no.1 for this keyword but tracking with Moz every metric we outperform them on, namely domain authority & Page Authority. I have noticed they have 4 anchor text links (dubious quality wordpress comments), with the anchor term vintage chanel bags and we have none despite ranking no. 1 for so long?? I'm trying to use the Moz science here, just a bit confused. Any help, insights, similar experience would be much appreciated. I engage only in white hat and look for slow & honest SEO growth (as far as I'm aware ! ). Thanks for looking Kevin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | well-its-1-louder0 -
href="#" and href="javascript.void()" links. Is there a difference SEO wise?
I am currently working a site re-design and we are looking at if href="#" and href="javascript.void()" have an impact on the site? We were initially looking at getting the links per page down but I am thinking that rel=nofollow is the best method for this. Anyone had any experience with this? Thanks in advanced
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | clickermediainc0 -
EMD with 3.3million broad match searches got hit hard by Panda/Penguin
k, so I run an ecommerce website with a kick ass domain name. 1 keyword (plural)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SwissNinja
3.3 million broad match searches (local monthly)
3.2 million phrase match
100k exact match beginning of march I got a warning in GWT about unnatural links. I feel pretty certain its a result of an ex-employee using an ALN listing service to drip spun article links on splogs. This was done also for another site of mine, which received the same warning, except bounced back much sooner (from #3 for EMD w/ 100k broad, 60k phrase and 12k exact, singular keyword phrase) I did file reinclusion on the 2nd (smaller) domain. Received unnatural warning on 4/13 and sent reconsideration on 5/1 (tune of letter is "I have no clue what is up, I paid someone $50 and now Im banned) As of this morning, I am not ranking for any of my terms (had boucned back on main keyword to spot #30 after being pushed down from #4) now back to the interesting site....
this other domain was bouncing between 8-12 for main keyword (EMD) before we used ALN.
Once we got warning, we did nothing. Once rankings started to fall,we filed reinclusion request...rankings fell more, and filed another more robustly written request (got denials within 1 week after each request)until about 20 days ago when we fell off of the face of the earth. 1- should I take this as some sort of sandbox? We are still indexed, and are #1 for a search on our domain name. Also still #1 in bing (big deal) 2- I've done a detailed analysis of every link they provide in GWT. reached out to whatever splog people I could get in touch with asking them to remove articles. I was going to file another request if I didn't reappear after 31 days after I fell off completely. Am I wasting my time? there is no doubt that sabatoge could be committed by competition by blasting them with spam links (previously I believed these would just be ignored by google to prevent sabatoge from becoming part of the job for most SEOs) Laugh at me, gasp in horror with me, or offer some advice... I'm open to chat and would love someone to tell me about a legit solution to this prob if they got one thanks!0 -
For traffic sent by the search engines, how much personalization/customization is allowed on a page if any?
If I want to better target my audience so I would like to be able to address the exact query string coming from the search engine. I'd also like to add relevant sections to the site based in the geo area they live in. Can I customize a small portion of the page to fit my visitors search query and geo area per the IP address? How much can I change a web page to better fit a user and still be within the search engine's guidelines?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Thos0030