Hi, I've recently taken over the running of our local cricket lcub website. For the primary keywords, the site is ranking #1 on MSN.com, #1 on yahoo.com, #3 on msn.co.uk & #2 on yahoo.co.uk With google, we kept changing between #20 and #60 which didn't make much sense to me. I put a script together which checks the SERPS with various google IP addresses. What I'm finding is some addresses return SERPS of 20 while others return SERPS of 60. My initial results show that the result a consistent within any singke datacenter. I suppose my question is: Is this normal ?? Do Google synchorise all datacenters over time ? I'm pretty new to this SEO stuff, and I simply don't know what the normal behavior for the SE's is.
jlawrence, you have come to the right place for your answers. Browse thru the various threads posted here and you will find your answers and also discover that you are no different than anyone else in being baffled by Google. (I really hate it when people tell me to RTFM when I ask a question and I apologize in advance for being guilty of doing it here.)
I've been browsing around this site for about a month and haven't yet found any answers. I've seen posts that say there are differences between datacenters - not suprising I'm not seeing wildly varying SERPs, I'm seeing 2 distinct sets of results: 1 set of datacenters return SERPs #20 the other returns #60. I'm going to monitor this over the next month of so and see what happens. I'm hoping that the 2 sets of datacenters will come into somekind of alignment.
not sure if you have it from your post...but look at MacDar's tool - it lists the various datacenter results http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp
The data centers are in a continual state of change. You may find when you next run your script that all three match up. Alternatively, the three might show differing results. It is normal to see Google results fluctuate.
I have a similar tool to the mcdar one. It basically cycles through a list of IP addresses and logs the SERP into a database so that I can see what's happening over time.
1. Yes it's normal. 2. Maybe! After the last update I noticed 3 groupings of positions on the datacentes. This then dropped to 2 after time. There are a couple of theories that Google uses different algorithims on different datacentres that produce these results. Another is that at an update the new results aren't rolled out onto all datacentres at the same time and this process happens over time. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens this time.
The mdar keywordtool does list an awful lot of pages - I think this is because the googlebot went mad and started indexing the calendar so it thinks there's over 6000 pages. We've only recently carried out a major change to the site - previously we had about 5 links, google's now reporting 2900 (don't know where they get that number from) - and I was wondering if we'd hit some weird type of sandbox due to the massive increase in number of pages. But when I check around the datacenters, and see a SERP of 20 on some then I'm pretty sure we're not sandboxed. What I think is happening, is that we're using the .com domain located on a 1 and 1 server (possibly in Germany) so we're ranking well on the global index, but not local (ie .uk) index.