How my rank in Google is affected by time and place.

[Heal3r]

I outsource a lot of my web work. My web guy lives in North Carolina and uses Firefox. I'm in Florida using IE. Since jagger we have been daily comparing the rankings for the site on our may keyword phrase. We will often differ in rank by a few spots, results, and even pr and # of backlinks.

I tested FF to see if IE was the issue. But the differences were still there.

My theory is he gets updated information before I do. As my results will eventually catch up to what his were.

So I wonder if my customers will see a different "ranking" based on their location? If so, who is seeing what ranking, as that affects tracking numbers. Your thoughts?

On a side note, I'm noticing quite a bit of fluctuation still. Looks like a pr update perhaps? and my rankings have been constantly bouncing around since Jagger. Anywhere between 1-11.

[brian.mark]

His seeing changes before you just means that he's hitting a different data center than you are. If you use an IP for google.com instead of the domain name, you should get the same results. Clicking on a "cache" link will show you the IP of the datacenter you were using.

Brian.

[Heal3r]

So I use the Ip and he uses the same ip for the datacenter and we get the same results. But it still seem sthat at a given time customers searching for my time across the country could see different results, depending on when the datacenter they draw from updates.

That's not a major issue but certainly interesting to me.

And still I wonder why my results have fluctuated every day since Jagger. I bounce around between 1 and 7 every day. I look at the different datacenters and I can see some where I am 7 and some 4 and some 3. Very interesting.

[ADAM Web Design]

Results 1 to 7 or Pages 1 to 7?

As far as the flux goes, that could be attributed to pages being indexed/reindexed across the different data centers (or DCs in geekese).

If you or any of your competitors make website changes or generate inbound links, they usually don't show across all the DCs at once.

Also, things such as duplicate content filtering, spam and the removal of such, and algo updates being applied at different times can affect the DCs. During the Jagger updates at one point, the three different updates were showing across different datacenters, which created a huge mess when trying to sort out what to do in its wake.

You may want to start playing with http://64.233.179.104 , as it's the new test DC for Google right now. There isn't as much flux as there was in Jagger, but there are some notable differences.

[brian.mark]

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

You may want to start playing with http://64.233.179.104 , as it's the new test DC for Google right now. There isn't as much flux as there was in Jagger, but there are some notable differences.

The main thing I noticed there is that we don't get the extra "Deep Links" that we get on the other data centers. If I hit a different one and search for tool parts, I get links to "Tool Schematics", "Porter Cable", "DeWALT" and "Bosch" on our site along with the standard listing. The test center hasn't seemed to have those.

Most of the phrases I track for our sites don't show much, if any, variation at that data center.

Originally Posted by Heal3r

But it still seem sthat at a given time customers searching for my time across the country could see different results, depending on when the datacenter they draw from updates.

That's the nature of the net. If you don't like the SERPs, wait 10 minutes and try again. They say that about the weather here in Nebraska as well, and it's usually accurate.

Brian.