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Seo Questions - Why Do I See Different Google Results Than My
By Rob Sullivan, Tue Dec 27th
Having been in this industry for as long as I have, I oftenforget some of the basics. Well, it's not that I forget, it'sjust that I assume that everyone else in the industry has thesame knowledge level as I do. So when I get a "newbie" asking a question like "Why are myGoogle results different than my clients" I have to take a stepback and realize that we aren't all equal. Therefore in this article I'm going to answer this one seeminglysimple question. While it may be simple to those of us "in theknow" this isn't always the case with others.
One of the scariest things you can do as a new is talk to aclient. That's because you are always worried that they aregoing to ask you a question that's over your head. And while youcan fake your way through some questions when you are new, thereare some that just stump you. Of course even the greenest of most SEO's usually know more thentheir clients so you don't often have to fake an answer. Ofcourse I would never advocate faking it. When I don't know, I'vefound the best thing you can say is "I don't know, let me findout and I'll get back to you." And that's just what happened the other day. A new person cameto me and said "I had a client who saw different Google resultsthan 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 literallytens of thousands of servers. Each server is part of a largercluster 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 longesttime Google only had about 13 data centers that served all theresults to the world. Now the number is estimated at around 80. While some of these data centers are used for pre-testingresults (for example, testing a new algorithm out before movingit to the main data centers) most are used just to deal with theload that Google receives every day. These data centers are dispersed throughout the US ingeographically specific areas. They have done this so thatqueries are served to the data center nearest to the user. For example, while there are a large
number of data centers onthe eastern coast, a person searching from San Francisco willlikely be served their search results from a data center nearthem, such as an Oregon or California data center. It is because of the differences in these data centers thatsomeone searching in New York will see different results thansomeone in Los Angeles. It is reasonable to think that each data center acts somewhatindependently of the others. That means that their updateschedules are different as are their crawling schedules. One caneven assume that the algorithm changes which affect the indexhappen at different times as well. This accounts for why there are differences in search results.Because of Google's perpetually updating index, the results yousee near you may be similar to results in other data centers butultimately different. This could be due to how the crawlers retrieve sites - a crawlermay find a site closer to it more easily and therefore add it tothe index sooner than a geographically far away crawler wouldfind the same site. For example, a site in Vancouver, Canada may appear in theCalifornia 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 dropa rock into a pond. If you drop just one rock, you see theripples move out from where you dropped it. However, if you drop2 rocks close to each other and at slightly different times yousee how the ripples interact with each other when they meet. The index changes reflect this type of interaction. One site canhave a subtle but noticeable effect on the index. Yet theeffects aren't noticed across all data centers at the same time.We can also see the changes in the index grow over time, so thatone Vancouver site's effect grows over time, but the effect isdifferent across the data centers because changes happening withother sites also has an impact. As you can see, this is why you will see different resultsacross the data centers. It's not necessarily because of onesingle event. Like itself, it's a culmination of smallerevents which causes the noticeable differences.
About the author:Rob Sullivan is a Consultant and Writer forhttp://www.textlinkbrokers.com
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