Which country does a search engine think you are located in?

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Which country does a search engine think you are located in?

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-09-11 14:47:37 - Graham Ellis
Search engines have moved forward dramatically over the past few years. We used to laugh when Well House Consultants was the top hit - in the world - for "Birth Notice" - but I suspect arrivals were very frustrated indeed to find that the article in question wasn't really a birth notice at all. These days, arrivals are far more accurate (thank goodness!) but there are still some places where the search engines aren't quite on target.

One such issue we came across earlier this year was in regard to having the search engines know where (in the world) our pages relate to. Our top level domain for our main site is a ".net" - carefully chosen as we're not limited to a single country in our work, and we provide internet (training) services. And www.wellho.net was hosted on a server that happened to be in Fremont, California. Nothing wrong with either choice there, but how on earth was Google supposed to know that it should serve up our pages when someone asked for "only UK pages", but not, perhaps, when someone asked only for "pages from the USA"? And it turned out to be might hard to discover just how the search engines place things by countries - after all, they don't publish their ranking algorithms; that would encourage people to play even more tricks than they do at the moment to get higher rankings!

Did we find a solution? Yes - sort of. With our web site traffic increasing dramatically (we now have some of our very niche technical pages accessed hundreds of times every day - and our whole site comprises many thousand pages), we moved www.wellho.net from a shared host to a dedicated server and we took the opportunity to specifically find a company that hosted in the UK. Not only did that (we hoped) give a UK element for the search engines, but it also cuts down the packet round trip time when we're working on the server, by a factor of about 10 times. That makes some difference to visitors browsing on our site - a marginal speed improvement - but it makes a big difference when we're working on our own server via a secure shell.

Here's a test showing our (new) www.wellho.net server in the UK, and the main domain (wellho.net) which still provides our backup and various other ancilliary services remaining in the USA.

earth-wind-and-fire:~/sep08 grahamellis$ ping www.wellho.net

PING www.wellho.net (83.170.95.163): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 83.170.95.163: icmp_seq=0 ttl=53 time=18.328 ms

64 bytes from 83.170.95.163: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=14.991 ms

64 bytes from 83.170.95.163: icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=14.1 ms

^C

--- www.wellho.net ping statistics ---

3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max = 14.1/15.806/18.328 ms

earth-wind-and-fire:~/sep08 grahamellis$ ping wellho.net

PING wellho.net (64.62.240.12): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 64.62.240.12: icmp_seq=0 ttl=51 time=169.043 ms

64 bytes from 64.62.240.12: icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=168.967 ms

64 bytes from 64.62.240.12: icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=170.284 ms

64 bytes from 64.62.240.12: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=169.576 ms

^C

--- wellho.net ping statistics ---

4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max = 168.967/169.467/170.284 ms

earth-wind-and-fire:~/sep08 grahamellis$

,000 question - do the search engines now see us as being primarily UK? Yes, early evidence is that they do - although I don't know if this is a score based thing and we're just "more UK" now, or whether a switch has been flipped.

In exploring how we're now seen, I came across this very useful site - the Robtex Swiss Army Knife - which provides a very useful free range of information, samples of which I'm pasting down the left hand side of these paragraphs. And they even have an animated banner:

which tells each of your site visitors about the connection they're currently on.

The diagrams (top) show how Robtex places our new server's network centre in relation to other main centres - how the traffic flows in and out - and the diagrams here show how our DNS is set up, the physical location of the server, and confirm that we are not blacklisted.