Google Struggling With IP Delivery
Google seems to be struggling with IP delivery – very worrying for people with AdWords campaigns targeted to specific locations.
All weekend at home (on Sky broadband via a BT line) my searches have been bringing up Google Local results targeted to London. Today in the office (via BT Business Broadband) the results are still targeted to London.
Google does give you the option to change your location but the default location is (or always used to be) targeted to your IP address.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
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Patrick,
Local targetting never seems to work for me (I’m on the Wirral). In your experience, whose IP address is used …the ISPs (which could be many miles away) or my own and what ties an IP address to a geo location??
IP addresses need to be assigned to locations and Google can then access the information from IP registers (as far as I understand).
ah okay, thanks Patrick. That appears to be something that Pipex don’t do particularly well then.
Google’s geo targetting is very poor. If you access the homepage from a National Express train (free wifi) it thinks that you are in Sweden because the satellite wifi is provided by a Swedish company.
That’s an understandable effect of database innaccuracies, but redirecting to google.se is not – especially when I’m logged in to my Google account which knows my location and language preferences.
I’ve never had a great experience with geotargeting in the U.S. either. Like you, I’ve just seen too many times people’s locations misidentified. I only run geotargeted campaigns when absolutely necessary now.
Noticed the same thing over here in Australia yesterday… even though I’m based in Brisbane, I was being served Sydney local search results. Still happening today too.
Well first, nice to see that blogstorm is active again
Geo-ip dns is what I do so I can confirm the shortcomings at the micro-level.
However, it is generally quite effective when deployed by multi-nationals to serve market specific content. (Think regional pricing in particular).
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April 13, 2009 at 8:04pm