Checking Google ranking in various countries

[rhonda427]

How do I check the actual ranking for my site in various countries as seen by a local person doing a search from within that country?

If I do a search for a certain keyword via for example www.google.de when using a DK-based ISP, I do not get search results like a German person using a german ISP would. Are there any tools/services that I can use to easily check my position in various european countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway)?

This would be relevant for me for both Adwords ranking and the normal Google ranking.

Thanks!

[glengara]

There's a FF plug-in that works with AW, not sure how it does with the organics though - search for "Google Global Firefox Extension"....

[edd1]

make the search then take the value at the end of the URL string from the & onwards

&btnG=Google+Search

and change it to

&gl=uk

where uk represents the country results you want to see eg. us ca fr

etc

hope this makes sense

Ed

[OutdoorMan]

Or use this tool: [google.com...] ("Search across languages")

[OutdoorMan]

Or maybe this: [google.com...] (Return pages written in [any language])

[rhonda427]

Thanks a lot. I believe it's a bit more triggy than this, as it seems to me as if Google - nomatter what you write after the & - will present search results based on the country where your IP is located.

This certainly is true for "Global Google Firefox Extension" and also putting for example "&gl=de" at the end of the url.

By using [google.com...] and specifying language to be German and domain to be .de, the result was more sensible, but I don't believe this would be what a "native" German would see. We have suddenly seen a large increase in hits from Germany on a certain keyword, and searching on this particular keyword didn't show our site on the first 25 pages. I suspect we are actually on page 1 or 2.

Probably the only way to do it would be to perform the search on a German based client somehow, but I just don't know how this could be achieved.

[KVeil]

rhonda427, "&gl=de" and "&hl=en in the actual search URL is not the same. "&gl=xx" gives you a way of telling the search where you want to be located...

However, I have found that

www.google.com/search?q=Widget&hl=en&safe=off&gl=US

and
www.google.com/search?q=Widget&hl=en&safe=off&gl=us

do NOT give the same results :o

K

[briggidere]

The big US gives more American orientated results as you seem to be more patriotic than using a small us? ;-)

[rhonda427]

This seems to be the place to do this kind of testing: [adwords.google.com...]

As far as I can see this seems to be a reliable presentation of your actual ranking seen from a given geographic location.

It would have been nice though, if you could easily extract your actual position as a matrix on various markets. The above tool requires you to manually look through a number of pages to locate where your website is located, but it does the trick :)

[KVeil]

rhonda427, that's a great find!

After a bit of pre-holiday experimenting, I have found that the same SERPs can be achieved by expanding the URL I gave above

www.google.com/search?q=Widget&hl=en&safe=off&gl=US

with the two extra parameters "&host=google.com&adtest=on" (look at the URLs of queries in the tool rhonda427 mentioned)

eg: [google.com ]

This query could be bookmarked for convenient daily SERP checking :)

K

[MarkWolk]

Fantastic discovery Rhonda427 and KVeil. Here is an alternate string to bookmark; it gives 100 search results per page as seen from the US:

[google.com...]