Google getting locations wrong - update

I found where i'm listed!

[igloo]

Regarding my message a while back about my sites being removed from UK only results in Google, I had a bit of a brainwave and realised that if I wasn't in the UK, Google must think the sites are elsewhere.

I tracked them down in www.googl.nl! Google thinks i'm Dutch! Also, looking through the SERPS for queries for Dutch results only ( [google.nl...] ) I managed to find over 16,000 .co.uk sites that Google thinks are also Dutch-based. This is a pretty substantial amount of misplaced sites (assuming all the .co.uks are hosted in the UK). I hope this problem has reached the magnitude that it might warrant some investigation by Google.

Anyone else find their misplaced sites in Google.nl or an alternative regional variation?

[edited by: igloo at 2:55 pm (utc) on Feb. 17, 2003]

[engine]

The I took an example and the IP range shows the sites listed on servers in Amsterdam.

Choose your host for its IP as carefully as you'd choose their hosting package.

[igloo]

I agree with what you say, but every possible check I can do on the IPs involved shows my sites correctly as being in London - only Google is getting this wrong, so I would not have had any way of knowing that this would happen.

[engine]

I found Holland immediately, not London. The IP for the nameserver is Holland.

[TallTroll]

I found that a block of Kelkoo's domains exhibit this, but a lot of the other sites seemed to have Dutch language versions (hosted in Amsterdam, despite the .co.uk ccTLD, in some case also perhaps?), which could account for the .nl listings

[Receptional]

What are you using to check the IP location Engine?

[edited by: Receptional at 3:29 pm (utc) on Feb. 17, 2003]

[engine]

>What are you using to check the IP location Engine?

Simply, look up the nameserver for the site and check the IP address at Ripe whois.

Bingo!

[vitaplease]

Igloo,

check this thread, it seemed Googleguy mentions .co.uk's should be included in Uk searches?

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[igloo]

My sites correctly resolve to GB using RIPE. Try this search - [google.nl...]

This returns a number of sites that are UK hosted (according to RIPE) but are stuck in Dutch only results - try education.guardian.co.uk (!) or www.thisisoxfordshire.co.uk, all in the top 10 results for the search above. There are clearly a number of sites affected.

[igloo]

My affected sites are not .co.uk domains, hence the problem. I'm going on about .co.uk in this thread because there are lots of them in Dutch-only SERPS, and many of them are clearly UK based sites that have been located wrongly.

[engine]

OK, interesting.

The first check I ran from some samples were all hosted in Holland. Easy to spot and straightforward.

I just ran some further checks on a range of domains listed in the G NL results and these were not hosted in Holland.

The examples you gave above are listed in G UK. The fact they are listed in G NL, too, is perhaps less importnat to the original question.

More extensive testing needs to be undertaken.

[vitaplease]

Did I remember well on Googleguy posting an url where you can complain for faulty geo-redirecting-stuff?

whats more the guardian site has predominant German language and not Dutch..

[igloo]

>The examples you gave above are listed in G UK. The fact they are listed in G NL, too, is perhaps less importnat to the original question.<

Not really, because they are included in G UK serps because of the .co.uk extension, with the IP located wrongly - which is the issue I was raising. It would also be very difficult to sift through the .nl results for .com/.net/.org sites that are affected, which is why I did the search for .co.uks - I figured this would highlight the problem.

[igloo]

Can anyone think of a way I might be able to estimate the amount of sites place in the wrong regional index, or the number of UK sites listed in the google.nl results? Short of wading through serps one by one it will be pretty tricky. Also the searches above were for UK-centric terms and so they're not very representative.

My thinking is if I can gauge the scale of the problem, I might be able to send Google an email they might pay attention to.

It's not that I'm doing nothing to rectify the problem for my own sites - I'm changing servers with those that are affected and from now on I'll only get .co.uk domains for UK-centric sites, but it would be nice for the problem to be fixed as it clearly affects quite a few people. At the moment if I want a .com .net or .org for a UK site, i'm taking my chances as to which country results I might end up in :)

[added]My 'D' key is not working very well btw, if my spelling seems a bit off [/added]