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
-
Should I Use A Local Hosting Center?
This question spawns from a comment I read in another post, but has anyone seen success switching from a hosting provider like bluehost, hostgator, etc to a local one in their area? Right now, we use Bluehost, but if there is a benefit to using one in Tampa, I'm all for it....before I do, I just want to see what the consensus is. Thanks, Ruben
Search Behavior | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
My satellite website is ranking better than my actual site. Why and what to do?
This is our website: www.sauspiel.de and this is the satellite website. As the satellite site has a better ranking for the keyword "schafkopf" since two or three weeks we wonder how this could happen and what would be best to change it or improve the situation. Shall we take down the satellite site, redirect to the "real" site or try to downgrade? And what would you consider to be the (strongest) reason? Any suggestions? Thanks a lot for your help and assessment!
Search Behavior | | sauspiel0 -
Is it possible to know if visitor arrived at the web page via organic search and if so, show some content?
Hello, Is it possible to know if visitors are arriving at a web page via organic search? Background: We have a section of job description pages to explain typical tasks. These have very high bounce rate (some 100%), and I think people are confusing them with actual jobs. For example "stage designer". Many of those keyword we have very high rankings. I am thinking of having a small notice at the top of those page to say something like "if you are stage designer job, check out our job section". Thanks
Search Behavior | | CreativeChoices0 -
Visual Website Optimizer vs. Optimizely vs. Conductrics
I've always done my own A/B testing and haven't used a software package. I've heard a lot of good about Visual Website Optimizer. However, I like that Conductrics uses statistical modeling where the others don't. So what do you see as being the really big pluses? Note: I need to find a platform so that we can do testing faster and for more clients at a time... I just don't have the time to hand build and track each client's multivariation test. Thus the need for software. Therefore, ease of use, quick integration, and good analytics are important in my decision making process. Thanks in advance!
Search Behavior | | SteveTheWoodsman2 -
Two sites with different URLs
I help organize an ecommerce site for a company that is named after the state that the company was founded in (ex: Florida Pipes). Our programmer is thinking about creating a duplicate site that would have a name that was more location agnostic so people shopping on the site would not think that they may be ordering from far away hence incurring extra shipping charges. He said that the site would only have a different URLs, name and homepage but would link to all of the same stuff that is on the site that is up now. He said that there would be no way to tell (possibly for the layperson) that the two sites were related. Is this a good practice? Would we be penalized in search results for having two URLs linking to the same content? (We are a 30 year old company that ranks very high for our main keyword) Thank you for your input!
Search Behavior | | Winoman0 -
Decline in engagement metrics, due to nav changes vs. content changes
With improvements in our rankings, we are seeing adverse changes in our measures of engagement. My gut reaction is to believe we are attracting more unqualified traffic, thus higher bounce rates, declines in pages/visit and time on site (approx 15%, 15%, 25%, respectively). While recent improvements in navigation might have contributed to these engagement declines, do you have any suggestions how best to determine whether these declines are due to nav changes vs. due to copy/content issues? There's been no change in copy content during this period. Thanks.
Search Behavior | | ahw0 -
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 -
Can we rank as a related search query on a competitor's brand keyword?
One of my clients wanted to know whether it's possible for him to rank as one of the related pages on Google for a brand name of a competitor. I honestly don't know whether it's possible so any ideas whether it's possible and if so, ideas on what can be done is greatly welcome. Thank you in advance. 🙂
Search Behavior | | als0070