Google Indexing IP in wrong country

[bwaldman]

I am not a technical person, so please excuse if this is a little short on technical detail.

Our hosting company, rackspace, seems to have assigned us an IP address which was once owned by a hosting company in Aukland, NZ. This was around 2-3 years ago. Our company is actually located in Boston, MA and the dedicated server is physically located in Texas.

Obviously this is causing confusion to Google and other indexes as we show up in searches for our main keywords in New Zealand geo modified searches.

A few weeks ago we changed the arin info for the server to correct company location to be Boston, MA and changed our Google webmaster tools account to indicate that we were a US company (That hadn't been specified in the past).

The change are now accurately reflected when you do a whois on the IP address, but for some reason the server is still showing as being located in New Zealand. It seems that the ARIN info is quick to update but that there is some secondary database of IP Geo locations which takes longer? It also seems that the slower to update info is what is used to designate your location to the search engines.

Our organic search rankings on google have dropped since we updated the info as I believe we are not "confusing" google by stating that we have a US company but serving our site on a NZ IP.

Anyone have any knowledge or experience with this? Is there this second database and how often does it update? Is there a way to make it faster? I don't even know if I am looking at the right things.

Thanks for any help!

[edited by: tedster at 4:55 pm (utc) on Aug. 4, 2008]

[tedster]

There certainly are many copies of an IP location database - to my knowledge many of these are often updated daily or better.

However, updating whois information does not change the location assignment of the IP address. There are free online tools that allow you to check IP-to-country information. I'd say see what kind of feedback you get from one of those.

You may need to have a change of IP address to get this all sorted out - and that's not a big deal for Google, by the way, if it's the only change.

[wilderness]

I detest making comments on colo's, it simply provides free advertsing.

Go to ARIN-Whois,
type in rackspace
then view the ranges.

The only possible confusion in the displayed ranges is "possibly" in the 209 Class A.

Are they providing you with an IP not shown in the ARIN search results, rather an APNIC range?
In the event that you have an APNIC IP range assigned, there is noy a thing you may to change your GEO perception, other than changing to another provider/rack.

[bwaldman]

I do not see my IP (72.32.107.***) within that range? When I did the whois on the APNIC site the IP didn't show up there either.

Not sure what to make of all this but thanks for your comments.

[edited by: tedster at 12:36 am (utc) on Aug. 5, 2008]
[edit reason] obscure the IP address [/edit]

[tedster]

That is a US IP address - so Google is confused about geo-locating in your case. Unfortunately you've got a lot of company at the moment.

[wilderness]

There is a range in the Class D that is registered to a NZ company that begins with "Planet).

[bwaldman]

Thanks Wilderness. Do you think this means I cannot get it changed to US and need to change IPs?

[tedster]

Just to clarify, I edited out the class D number for the sake of anonymity but I did check the full IP and it is listed as US. However, the presence of one IP in the range that is registered to a NZ company seems to be tripping up Google.

It's worth trying a "reconsideration request" through Webmaster Tools. However, sometimes buggy data does just need to be thrown out, so a new IP may be teh fastest route to a fix.