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
-
Link with Anchor to header of the page: Keyword is ranking
I saw something interesting this week. I am doing research and spec-ing out a content page we are creating and one of our competitors "office Depot" on their phone repair page create exact match keywords that lead to an anchor that took you to the header of that pages. They were ranking first for all of those keywords with little to no links Thier strategy is the more local long tail that includes "near me" Have you guys ever seen this
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uBreakiFix
this is the URL: https://www.officedepot.com/a/content/customer-service/samedayrepair/ They are ranking for these keywords ( Top 3 nationally ) iphone 6 repair near me iphone 7 repair near me I am assuming that this is both due to their PA and DA authority shifting the authority to itself, but it does not make sense how they are lacking in a lot of SEO low-hanging fruits like H1/H2 keyword saturation, URL, Title Tag within this content page....Anyone up for discussing this?0 -
Linking Websites/ Plagiarized Content Ranking Above Original Content
Hey friends! Sooo this article was originally published in December 2016: https://www.realwealthnetwork.com/learn/best-places-to-buy-rental-property-2017/ It has been consistently ranking in positions 2-3 for long tail keyword "best places to buy rental property 2017" (and related keywords) since January-ish. It's been getting about 2000-2,500 unique views per week, until last week when it completely dropped off the internet (it's now ranking 51+). We just did a site redesign and changed some URL structures, but I created a redirect, so I don't understand why that would affect our ranking so much. Plus all of our other top pages have held their rankings -- in fact, our top organic article actually moved up from position 3 to 2 for much more competitive keywords (1031 exchange). What's even weirder is when I copy the sections of my article & paste into Google with quotes, our websites doesn't show up anywhere. Other websites that have plagiarized my article (some have included links back to the article, and some haven't) are ranking, but mine is nowhere to be found. Here are some examples: https://www.dawgsinc.com/rental-property-the-best-places-to-buy-in-the-year-2017/ http://b2blabs.com/2017/08/rental-property-the-best-places-to-buy-in-the-year-2017/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-places-buy-rental-property-year-2017-missy-lawwill/?trk=mp-reader-card http://news.sys-con.com/node/4136506 Is it possible that Google thinks my article is newer than the copycat articles, because of the new URL, and now I'm being flagged as spam? Does it think these are spam websites we've created to link back to our own content? Also, clearly my article is higher quality than the ranking articles. Why are they showing up? I double checked the redirect. It's good. The page is indexed... Ahhh what is going on?! Thanks for your help in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jessica7110 -
Rank drop after link reclamation
Link reclamation is good activity interms of technical SEO and UX. But I noticed couple of times rank drop post the link reclamation activity. Why does this happen? What might be the cause? Beside redirecting to the most relevant page in contest to the source page content; anything else we must be looking into?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Was I hit by Panda/Payday Loan/Penguin?
Good Mozzing, So, as some of you may know based on my previous post, I am working with an odd situation here. I have taken over an account for a company and the Main domain pretty much falls into the category of everything Google hates. I have suggested to the CEO that the practices they did before me were sorta in the Grayhat realm bordering on Blackhat but I need empirical data before I can make any drastic changes. In May and June of 2013 Panda, Penguin, and Payday Loan all had updates. Our company has nothing do to with porn, apartment rentals, finances, or anything like that, but the SEO methods used were, as I said, questionable. In June of 2013 there was a drop from 8,000 sessions to 5,000 sessions from organic traffic. If I switch over to all referring traffic the loss increases to 11,000 to 7,000 sessions. To me that seems pretty substantial. Not only that, but according to the data we have not been able to recover.There was a steady climb for about 5 months before the drop, and then now we are in this middle ground. I have only been here for about 2 weeks, so the things I have been uncovering are pretty amazing. Is that enough to assume that we were indeed hit by the updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler2 -
Please Correct This on-site SEO strategy w/ respect to all the updates
Hello, I believe my on-site SEO process that I used to use a couple of years ago is not working well anymore for a couple of my sites, including this one. I'll tell you the old strategy as well as my new strategy and I'm wondering if you can give me pointers that will help us rank where we should rank with our PA and DA instead of getting moved down because of what could be our old on-site SEO. OLD ON-SITE SEO STRATEGY: Title tags usually match the page, but title tags occasionally on this site don't match the pages exactly. There's not many of them, but they do still exist in a couple of places. Title tags are either 1. A phrase describing the page 2. Keywords 1, Keyword 2 3. Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 4. Keywords 1, Keyword 2, branding The keywords are in the h1 and h2 of each main page, at the very top of the page. The h1 and h2 do not exactly copy the title tag, but are a longer phrase with the keywords appearing in their exact word order or in word variations. See this page for an example. Keywords occur 3-4 times in the body of the main pages (the pages with a menu link). Right now some of the pages have the exact phrases 3 or 4 times and no variation. meta description tags have exact keyword phrases once per keyword. Meta description tag are a short paragraph describing the page. No meta keyword tags, but a couple haven't been deleted yet. FUTURE ON-SITE SEO STRATEGY: I'm going to change all of the page titles to make sure they match the content they're on exactly. If the title is a phrase describing a page, I'm going to make sure a variation of that phrase occurs at least three times in the content, and once in the meta description tag. Title tags will be either a. Short phrase exactly matching page b. Keyword 1, Keyword 2 | branding c. Keyword 1 | branding 2. I'm thinking about taking out the H1 and H2 and replacing them with one tag that is a phrase describing the page that I'll sometimes put the keyword phrase in, only a variation in it and not the exact keyword phrase - unless it just makes total sense to use the keyword phrase exactly. **I'm thinking of only using the keyword phrase in it's exact words once on the page unless it occurs more naturally, and to include the keyword phrase in word variations two more times. So once (in non-exact word order) in the at the top, once (exact word order) in the text, and two more times (varied word orders) somewhere in the text. All this will be different if the keywords show up naturally in the text. **3. I'll delete all meta keyword tags, and still use exact keyword phrases in meta description tag, though I'll change the meta description tags to always very closely match what the page is about. Do you think my new strategy will make a difference? Your thoughts on any of this?****
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Copied Content/ Copied Website/
Hello guys, I was checking my product descriptions and I found out that there is a website that is using my descriptions word by word, also they use company name, product images, they have a link that sends you to my site, contact form.. I tried to purchase something and the order came through our email, but i made an inquire and it didn't come through. Also they have a sub-folder with my company name. Also they have url's with my company name, and this isn't right is it? I am confused and honestly I don't know what to do, we don't take part to any affiliation program or anything like that and we don't ship out of Europe. This is a Chinese website. Just for curiosity, I noticed that one of our competitors is there as well, and it does seem weird. Here is the links: www.everychina . com/company/repsole_limited-hz1405d06.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Why is the rankings for certain targeted keywords dropping sharply in the past few weeks?
Excuse me here I can't reveal the website url here due to the confidentiality. Background: This website has about 100+pages, and is a wordpress site. Out of 15 targeted keywords, there are few ranked first on Google.co.uk. others are ranked between 3rd and 50+. In the past couple of weeks, we have been submitting to various websites/directories. and 4 main keywords' rankings are improving steadily from 50+ to 20+. We don't buy links, or pay for link exhcanges. We only exchange links on rare occasions. Symptoms: 1. 2 out of 4 main keywords dropped its rankings from 20+ to 80+ 4 weeks ago over night. 2. We kept on acquiring links from directories and websites, and 2 weeks after the drop, the rankings of 2 affected keywords had gradually made its way back to 20-30. Just we thought the glitch was over, these 2 keywords has dropped rankings to 50+ once again. 3. The change of rankings looks too suspicious to us, so we went to use the Moz tool, and discovered the domain authority has also dropped 25% of its value in a month time. We never experienced such violent changes in terms of rankings in such a short period of time. My question is: what factors there are to have caused such violent shifts? Why the value of the domain authority is dropped by 25%-30%? What elements affect the domain authority the most?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robotseo0