Does location affect what results you see?

Does location by city/state/country affect anyhting in terms of SERP?

 

Country and region does for sure, I doubt city and state effects anything though.

 

It definitely affects the ads that get served as far as state/city goes.

 

Yes all of those things do.

 

intresting

so i assume you would have to have the city/state/etc name somewhere on the site for G to determine location?

 

I think that the Google version you use also makes a difference.
For example, I'm here in Ontario and I can search on Google Canada (which is what my ISP [MSN/Sympatico] serves up) or I can go to Google.com. Moreover, I have the choice with Google Canada to search "the web" or "pages from Canada" (no quotes). In each case, the SERPs vary and, from what I can see, the appearance of my (relevant) AdWord isn't consistent either.
This scenario seems to apply to users in the UK and Australia in much the same way, according to posts to WebProWorld.

It's a puzzlement, although I'd be astonished if Google would ever explain how/why it happens.

Duncan
PS. I haven't bothered to check MSN or Yahoo but I can imagine that their SERP results also differ if you aren't US located.

 

i think it has no difference for the main global serp. all people around the world will see the same things.
but when you select the local search feature the result would be different.

 

No, anybody can determine the latitude and longitude of a website/webuser from the IP address.

 

Hi,

rlynch was talking about the location of the web site and the ones who answered explained how the location of the user can change the SERP's.

I agree with mad4. Google determines the location of web sites thanks to a database providing locations against IP addresses. MSN and others do it as well, but, as far as I can see, Google makes much less mistakes.

I do not completely agree about the influence of the location of the user. If, from anywhere in the world, you use Google Belgium (google.be), you will see the same results (with some data center variations as usual). The same applies to any other local Google version. I also believe that when you search with www.google.com/ncr , you use worldwide the same US/international version of Google.

In many countries, when you connect to Google for the first time, you are automatically redirected to the local Google. This gives the impression that results differ depending on location, but one can easily connect to another Google country version.

Results are also different depending on the language of the Google user interface. Results are different when searching for "webmaster" in French, English or German through google.be.

Jean-Luc