Does Google have Japanese data centers?

Referers from Google invisible in Europe

[zCat]

Hi there

I have a website with many Japanese pages on a server based in Europe. Google has never liked it much, but that's fine by me. However recently I've been noticing referers from the Japanese Google for SERPs which I can't reproduce from Europe. I.e. I copy and paste the referer into a browser, but my site doesn't come up in the SERPs.

The Googlebot has been doing a deepish crawl recently, so
I'm guessing Google puts the more recent data for Japanese-language sites in data centers nearer Japan. Does anyone have any pointers on this, and any idea how I can view the SERPs as they appear in Japan (without actually going there?)

[bill]

We had a thread Google Data Center - for Japan!?! [webmasterworld.com] a couple of years ago asking about this. I haven't heard much about this recently, but I don't think the geographic location of Google's datacenters is the issue in your case.

Are you using a .jp domain? Do you have the encoding properly set in your HTML? Usually Google is pretty good at indexing Japanese language content regardless of hosting location or ccTLD.

[zCat]

Are you using a .jp domain? Do you have the encoding properly set in your HTML? Usually Google is pretty good at indexing Japanese language content regardless of hosting location or ccTLD.

The domain a plain simple .com. Coding is not an problem, the pages Google has (and all the other SEs for that matter) are indexed correctly. (Google just doesn't like the site for plain old SEO reasons, but in this case it doesn't matter that much).

The "issue" is that people in Japan are finding the site via www.google.co.jp with certain queries; when I (located in Europe) input those same queries manually into google.co.jp, or paste the entire referer into the browser, I cannot find the site anywhere. So I can only presume the SERPs in Japan are slightly different to the one's I'm seeing; based on my knowledge of the site and it's history with google, I'm guessing some pages have been indexed recently but haven't percolated through to the western world.

FWIW I see the following:
> host www.google.co.jp
www.google.co.jp is an alias for www.google.com.
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com has address 66.102.9.99
www.l.google.com has address 66.102.9.104
www.l.google.com has address 66.102.9.147

[zCat]

Just to follow up: I found some, hmm, open proxies in Japan and did some experimentation. It appears the pages in question are mainly those from Google's supplemental index; they are showing on google.co.jp when queried "from" Japan, but not from outside Japan. Also, google "in Japan" shows about double the number of pages when doing a "site:www.example.com kw-on-every-page" type query.

However, for those pages that are showing in both version, the non-Japanese version is showing more up-to-date snippets. Both have the same, more recent cached version.