Do you see what I see?

While trying to put together some screenshots for a potential client, proving our SEO capabillities, we stumbled upon a (very) rare occurance in Google. There has been much made about the great Google Datacentres in the sky, and in the old days, they used to be watched like hawks to see if any new pagerank updates were on their way. However, since the Jagger (or Big Daddy) update a year or so ago, I thought that most Google Datacenters showed the same results. I was wrong...

It still seems that the results you get from Google depend on where you are in the country. While I was sat in my Southampton office and seeing the great SEO positions we've got, in Surrey something strange was afoot. Not only were we not on top of the listings, sometimes we weren't even on the ten pages! It was like Google was being geographically biased!

After some research on datacentre issues, it turned out that our problem was indeed down to Google being different. How did we know? Are you ready to get techy?

If you go to Start > Control Panel > Accessories > Command Prompt (or for the dextrous of you Windows Key & R) you'll see the Command Prompt (surprise, surprise). If you type in;

ping www.google.co.uk

you'll get a number which looks like this;

216.239.59.99

This is the IP address of the Google.co.uk domain. If you try this somewhere else in the country, or perhaps at a different time of the day, the number could be very different. If the numbers are different, it means that you're going to a different data centre, and so could get a completely different set of results. In theory, they should all have the same results. But a word of warning, they may not, so if you're SEO rankings appear to have vanished, then this could be one of the reasons why...

Update: Hmmm, the plot thickens. I've just watched the whole video by Matt Cutts (top Google Geek blogger) and he said that even if the IP addresses are different, they can still show different results! Arrrghhhhhh!!!