Webiste Ranking Differently Based on IP/Data Center

[seomozzy]

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!

[danatanseo]

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?

[JDP]

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?

[seomozzy]

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!

[danatanseo]

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!

[seomozzy]

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

[jshklt]

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!

[gfiorelli1]

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.