Search Optimization SEO

Checking your Google Ranking in Different Countries

So you search google.com and find you have a nice rank. Not so fast. Google has a number of data centers that feed their results depending on where you are searching. These data centres typically align fairly well in their results and differences between them largely occur for relatively short periods of time when results are being updated. There are a number of tools on the web that will allow you to do a search or check your position across multiple data centers including the tool as SEOChat and at SEOlogs.

A much more difficult issue to track down is that searches from Google.com are regional specific. I am not talking here about differences when you use a country specific Google extension such as www.google.com.au rather than www.google.com. I am rather talking about regional differences in www.google.com itself.

To complicate the matter further, Google released a feature that allows you to add to your region to the search string to get an indication of how you are ranking in different countries. Unfortunately, this doesn’t exactly work correctly and you will not see the same results as someone in that region just loading google.com and doing a search. This makes it very difficult to determine exactly how you are ranking in different countries.

The only way I have found to really be confident in this is to use sites known as proxies. A proxy is a site that is intended to allow you to remain anonymous while you surf. Essentially, you surf the web through the proxy and while you are able to see your page through the proxy site, it is actually the proxy that is doing the surfing. This is useful for us in that you can find proxies that are hosted in different parts of the world, load google.com in the proxy and do your search. This will appear to Google as someone in that part of the world is doing the searching and you will get a true indication of your ranking in that part of the world.

Other tools I have seen that claim to give regional specific Google results all seem to use Google’s regional feature in the search query that does not seem to work, so it appears the proxy is the only way to go here.