Guys, A little while ago I build up a new site and put a lot of effort into on-page optimization. I was ranked as high as #5 for a certain keyword. Suddenly, one night, I just dropped to around #15. As I started checking the various Google Data Centers, I noticed that on many of them, my site is still ranked #5 for that particular keyword. This leads me to my questions: 1) Why do all Google Data Centers have different rankings of SERPS? 2) How are Google Data Centers allocated to users? So for example, if I search from Toronto, which Data Center do I get? If I search from New York, which data center will I see? 3) How to achieve consistency on ALL Google Data Centers? Thanks!
Checking multiple data centers is worthwhile only in terms of alerting you to possible changes in your rankings. You can't be sure which ones are relevant to your target markets, you can't tell which ones are working with new data, and you can't tell which ones are working with test data. Complicating the situation further is the fact that Google's load balancing takes place behind the IP address level, which means that the information you receive from a given IP address may not be coming from the same data center when you check it the next time. So you really can't tell much about your rankings by checking multiple data centers except, perhaps, when a major change is rolling out among them. And you can only see that by checking them regularly and noticing the changes over time. Between load balancing, personalized search, geo-location issues, and local search, the days of saying you rank in Google at position x are pretty much gone because everybody gets a slightly different result with each search. Today you're either doing very well (generally in the top 5), pretty well (generally in the top 20), mediocre (20-50), or not well at all (50+ which is essentially invisible).
Nope; different data centers show different results. On some data centers I am ranked high on certain keywords, on others I am no where near the same spots.
Answers 1)Google Datacenters are located in different regions of the world.. they are localized in one way or another display the search results that are more locally relevant to the users 2)If you search from Toronto it will go to the nearest datacenters. to which you are located.. 3)It depends upon various factors.. a)Your hosting ip b)Your keywords and content c)To a little extent your backlinks also..
yes most of the results for the data centers are different due to google's localization algorithms. For instance somebody who ranks well for dentist will not rank well for the term "atlanta dentist" unless they are a dentist in atlanta.