Local vs Global Search Results Yield Very Different Rankings Lately
-
When I monitor my website's rankings, I always do it from Canada (direct connection) and from the USA (using a VPN in Arizona). I've been monitoring rankings this way for the last 3 years.
Most of the time, I got similar results (-5 / +5) from both location.
My website is a ".com" and targets an international audience.
Lately (is it since Panda 22?), I've seen dramatic differences in rankings from both locations. Some keywords will rank in the top 10 on Google.com (from the USA) while they will appear on page 3, 4, 5 and even lower on Google.ca (from Canada).
The thing is, the top 10 results on Google.ca are not even from canadian websites. Fact of the matter, there are even some results from India websites (.in) in the top 10!
I understand that Google.ca will give advantage to websites from Canada (or targeting the canadian market / .ca domain name) over international / US websites but there's never been such a huge difference in rankings until lately.
Has anybody else experienced this?
What are your thoughts?
-
Have you looked at the hosting country of all websites concerned? I have a .co.uk site that appears in .ca even though it's very directly targeting the UK but is hosted on a dedicated server in Canada.
The other thing to consider is that possibly these sites outranking you in google.ca are targeting .ca in their Webmaster tools, even if it's hard to tell who'd they be targeting based on the sites themselves.
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
-
Displaying different site content to users who have already visited your site
I've seen and heard about the concept of treating repeat site visitors differently, displaying different content based on behavior etc. Not sure what it's called buy Hubspot seems to offer something like this with their platform. Anyone know of a third party app (Wordpress perhaps) or tool that does this? How does this even work? Thanks for the help!!
Search Behavior | | RickyShockley0 -
Google site: search showing twice amount of indexed pages. why?
I have around 50k pages indexed on my site but when I do a google site: of my site it shows around 100k pages indexed. Why is it showing so much more? It is also only showing around 700 pages indexed in my web masters account for the site. Background: We have a custom site map being generated automatically. Let me know if you would like more info, Thanks.
Search Behavior | | Nicktaylor10 -
Google Analytics Search Engine Optimisation Report
Hello, Quick question. How much data should be available within Google Analytics within the Search Engine Optimisation Reports? I was always of the impression it was 6 months, however the data available as of this date only extends back to January 1st 2013. Thanks,
Search Behavior | | HelloAlba0 -
How to best figure out synonymous search phrases
I'm curious about synonymous key phrases and competitive key term analysis. I have a few methods for conducting research to find what phrases Google considers synonymous but they are very time consuming. What are some ways to figure this out? An example would be livestock and cattle. Are there any good ways to figure out user intent related key phrases? For example in our niche if someone is looking to purchase something Google often delivers pages with title tags that include the term supplies. Would it be advantageous to optimize for these types of key phrases if the competition is less or should I assume that Google groups exact match and synonym and intent match together when calculating relevancy. Eg I can choose to target livestock or cattle on page. Livestock gets a quarter the search volume cattle gets but has half the competition. Will I be competing against the cattle sites too? If so should I just bite the bullet and target cattle?
Search Behavior | | Punkaj0 -
Keyword order on location searches
If someone is trying to find a service in a certain area they might use Google to search for "London plumber", "Plumber London" or "Plumber in London". Is there any research to show which of these tends to be used most, or are they all roughly the same? Thanks!
Search Behavior | | MagicianUK0 -
Google Places rankings go away, but organic rankings stay the same / get better?
Hello, I hope you all can help me out here with the information I could provide. Anyways, the past number of months I have had 1 of our clients rank extremely high organically and on Google places. For example: My client is a law firm so if you search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” they would come up organically on the first page and if you were in that town and search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” or even just “Attorney” they would also come up in the Google Places list. Now for some reason starting a week ago I noticed they have completely disappeared from Google Places. No changes have been done to their site and everything is the same as it was. Their organic searches are the same if not better than before. Do you guys have any clue as to why this happened and how I could possibly turn this around? Thanks for your help in advance!
Search Behavior | | WhiteHat120 -
Ranking Problem (my most important Q so far on here)
Hi, I have a keyword which is location specific and without any work doing to it, it ranked page 4 position 7. I did 4 guest posts all in one go and the it moved to page 3 position 5, I then left it for a week (position didn't move) and did another guest post a day after the guest post had been indexed I lost rankings and moved back to page 4, position 4. Has anyone got an idea why this happened? Is it a case its just fluxing and I could see in a few days it come back to page 3 position 2 or do you think I got an initial boost because the guest posts all went up and its just a fluke that it dropped when the 5th one went up? This is a big deal for me because I rely on guest posting a lot, I've even got a copy writer pumping out 500 quids worth of content a month just for guest blogging. I need to understand what is happening, this is one of the most important questions so far on here so I would appreciate some talk on the matter.
Search Behavior | | activitysuper0 -
Interesting keyword ranking issue
Hello Everybody, Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Without further ado, I'll jump straight to it: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk is the web site of a UK based data recovery company. Historically the site has always ranked well for popular data recovery keywords in the UK, with page 1 rankings for most things data recovery related. However, lately things seem to have changed for our most important phrase "data recovery". We noticed several months ago that Google had started to favour the page http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm instead of http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ when a search for "data recovery" (and similar) was performed. This didn't concern us that much as our rankings remained good. However now, neither of these pages seems to be ranking well when a search for "data recovery" is performed (I gave up at Page 5 - who looks past there when searching?). I would appreciate your input on this please - especially about the following points: 1. Why have these two pages now seemingly disappeared from SERPS when a search for "data recovery" is performed ? 2. Why has Google chosen http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm rather than http://www.dataclinic.co.uk ? 3. Is this just something to do with UK results ? 4. Other sites I would expect NOT to see in the top results have started appearing - despite their link profiles etc remaining poor - perhaps Google is doing a bit of reorganisation with SERPS related to data recovery at the moment ? 5. And perhaps, most importantly - do you think we need to do anything about our current lack of visibility ?? As I mentioned, we've always ranked well, so these results are puzzling... Should search results revert "back to normal" in a day or so, or am I missing something and need to take action ?? Thanks for any input on this - we would be very grateful indeed for you help ! Kind Regards, Sue
Search Behavior | | 3Amigos0