Testing Searches Appearing on Different Google Servers

[BettyM]

Over the past few days, I have search terms that are showing 100+ position differences depending on what Google server I happen to hit. Tonight my search terms seem to be in a great position again but I don't know if I am searching a server that is using the latest algorithm or hasn't be updated to the version that dropped me 100 positions.

Can someone tell me how to test several servers at once for my search term? Also, any way to know which server has the latest algorithm?

[tedster]

We can only know which IP address is giving us the results - but any given IP address can still be routed to different servers at different times. All you can do is enter an IP address directly, but that still is no guarantee of which server you are getting and whether it has the most recent data.

There are various Google datacenter tools available online (we don't discuss specific tools here, by the way) but they have the same limitation that you would from your browser - they can only target an IP address, not a server. Google's internal routing assigns that dynamically.

So which is the latest data? If your recent rankings showed -100 and now you're seeing +100 sometimes, and your not logged into a Google account, you have good reason to think the +100 is the latest. It's not likely for the data to revert to an even earlier version.