Having been in this industry
for as long as I have, I often forget some of the basics.
Well, it’s not that I forget, it’s just that I assume
that everyone else in the industry has the same knowledge
level as I do.
So when I get a “newbie”
asking a question like “Why are my Google results different
than my clients” I have to take a step back and realize
that we aren’t all equal.
Therefore in this article
I’m going to answer this one seemingly simple question.
While it may be simple to those of us “in the know”
this isn’t always the case with others.
One of the scariest things
you can do as a new SEO is talk to a client. That’s
because you are always worried that they are going to
ask you a question that’s over your head. And
while you can fake your way through some questions when
you are new, there are some that just stump you.
Of course even the greenest
of most SEO’s usually know more then their clients so
you don’t often have to fake an answer. Of course
I would never advocate faking it. When I don’t
know, I’ve found the best thing you can say is “I don’t
know, let me find out and I’ll get back to you.”
And that’s just what happened
the other day. A new person came to me and said
“I had a client who saw different Google results than
I did, and I didn’t know what to tell them.”
So let me give you the answer
I gave him.
Google, like all the other
engines, is comprised of literally tens of thousands
of servers. Each server is part of a larger cluster
of computers. Each cluster forms part of a datacenter.
Each datacenter then acts as an independent branch of
Google.
These datacenters are found
all over the US. For the longest time Google only
had about 13 data centers that served all the results
to the world. Now the number is estimated at around
80.
While some of these data
centers are used for pre-testing results (for example,
testing a new algorithm out before moving it to the
main data centers) most are used just to deal with the
load that Google receives every day.
These data centers are dispersed
throughout the US in geographically specific areas.
They have done this so that queries are served to the
data center nearest to the user.
For example, while there
are a large number of data centers on the eastern coast,
a person searching from San Francisco will likely be
served their search results from a data center near
them, such as an Oregon or California data center.
It is because of the differences
in these data centers that someone searching in New
York will see different results than someone in Los
Angeles.
It is reasonable to think
that each data center acts somewhat independently of
the others. That means that their update schedules are
different as are their crawling schedules. One can even
assume that the algorithm changes which affect the index
happen at different times as well.
This accounts for why there
are differences in search results. Because of
Google’s perpetually updating index, the results you
see near you may be similar to results in other data
centers but ultimately different.
This could be due to how
the crawlers retrieve sites - a crawler may find a site
closer to it more easily and therefore add it to the
index sooner than a geographically far away crawler
would find the same site.
For example, a site in Vancouver,
Canada may appear in the California data center days
before the eastern data centers. Because this
site would be added to the west data center sooner,
it will have an impact on the search results returned
sooner.
Consider it like the ripples
you see in the water when you drop a rock into a pond.
If you drop just one rock, you see the ripples move
out from where you dropped it. However, if you
drop 2 rocks close to each other and at slightly different
times you see how the ripples interact with each other
when they meet.
The index changes reflect
this type of interaction. One site can have a subtle
but noticeable effect on the index. Yet the effects
aren’t noticed across all data centers at the same time.
We can also see the changes in the index grow over time,
so that one Vancouver site’s effect grows over time,
but the effect is different across the data centers
because changes happening with other sites also has
an impact.
As you can see, this is why
you will see different results across the data centers.
It’s not necessarily because of one single event.
Like SEO itself, it’s a culmination of smaller events
which causes the noticeable differences.
Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant
and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com |
