Country of origin affects search results?

[GerardJ]

Hi,

I’m new to SEO and what I’ve discovered today may well be common knowledge but thought it worth posting because of it’s importance.

Logging on to Yahoo Australia I manually checked rankings for my favoured keyword phrases selecting worldwide search. Using a link from a US visitor to my site, I then performed the same worldwide search. The number of ‘results’ was the same (3,900,000) but the positions were decidedly different. The ww search from the au site ranked my site at no 2 whereas the ww search from the us site wasn’t so generous and the ranking received was 18.

To confirm the result I performed each search on another 2 occasions. I also took another two phrases and got the same results. On each occasion the number of ‘results’ were the same but the positions different, 10 V 25 and 3 V 28 respectively.

If my results and subsequent assumptions are correct then Yahoo is using different criteria dependent on from where you do your search.

The most obvious thing to note here is that the searches performed from au ranked my site much higher then the same searches from us and you may read into that what you will. FYI my address is .com.au but my hosting company is us based.

If you’re an SEO executive being paid on performance you may or may not want to know about the above depending on which part of the globe you reside. On the other hand if it’s old news then I’ve just wasted your time reading this useless thread.

GerardJ

[mcanerin]

You are missing a critical step - it doesn't affect all search results, just the country-specific ones. It's common knowledge for professional SEO's, but not outside of the profession.

I first wrote an article about it in Oct 2003 (Only in Canada, eh? (http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/local-search-01.asp)), and then a more recent one in October 2005 (Geolocation Redirects for SEO's (http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-geolocation.asp)).

Most search engines assume that, for example, Australian sites are more likely to be relevent to Australian visitors.

Therefore, when you do a search from Australia, sites that are known to be Australian (or popular with Australians) are given a free rankings boost.

The only large country this doesn't appear to work for is the USA, (but they have other benifits and are not complaining about this) so if you want to do a baseline rankings check, try to do it from a US IP.

But if you have an Australian client who sells to Australia, then feel free to do the rankings check ifrom Australia, since the rankings everywhere else are meaningless to the client.

Ian

[Kate]

There is actually an added level of complexity to this. These things all affect your search results:
1. Your geographical location based on IP
2. Which country version of an engine you connect to (google.com vs. google.fr)
3. Which data center you land on

I wonder how you SEO experts out there are managing your tracking for multinational clients. Say you have a client with operations in 6 countries. Your office is in one of those 6, but you have no staff in any of the other 5. When you report back to your client on rankings, are you reporting rank as you see it from your office? Or do you set up your tracking to use proxies in each country?

I'm asking because this is what I'm trying to do. I see sometimes very significant differences between ranking from where I'm located and ranking from local countries, even on the same version of an engine. Obviously it doesn't look good when I send out my report saying "you're 14th" and they check and show up 4th, even if they are happy with that better result. So I wonder what solution other people are using.

Kate