Ever wondered how Google traces you?
When you put a keyword into the search bar, how fast does Google pick it up? To make it more understandable, how does it filter its results for you, given the country you are based in and the language you use?
You make a bunch of ‘macho technologists’ who do SEO sit in the boardroom. You haul their brains together and the common answer coming out of the discussion would be your IP Address. Mark it somewhere right now. This answer is going to be unanimous!
Look at it from the Google perspective. For every query made, Google intends to deliver the most relevant results. It looks for all those signals that assist making that prediction, to determine the eventual result. The location of the end user holds weight with respect to the purpose the searcher searches with.
Suppose a person does a search, say on anything with geographical affinity. Pasta is quintessentially Italian, so the person doing it from Milan would want results showing up in Italian. How does this message get relayed to Google the results should be in Italian and not, say in, English?
Your Domain maybe remitted more importance than the IP Address
The first thing Google would do is find out what country you are in? The company has to get that right anyhow. Remember, its brand equity is too big to stake!
IP Addresses country wise become easy to track. The find outs are usually accurate. However, Google shows more keenness towards domains rather than IP Addresses.
On a more technical side, things not visible to us, there happens some movement between the Google.com domain and Google.it (Italia because of the Pasta!). Fluctuations happen, making the testing done to track results flowing in from diverse data centers evident.
What is unknown to the common folk here is the ascendancy of the domain. The Italian IP Address used for the keyword is somewhere a hidden factor. Google uses IP Addresses for hyper-local results. Users are also redirected to relevant Google domains, reinforcing the importance of IP Addresses.
Sit in Italia, and search for ‘Pasta’ from Google.it and Google.de. You observe the results for the former show up in Italian, and for the latter in German. It shows the search engine successfully overrides language settings, despite the same PC and IP.
Technical experts who study search engines from close quarters claim keywords have an invisible ‘language tag’ which determines how they are presented through results. Google identifies this, tracks your whereabouts and displays results accordingly.
Now you know why you got what you sought! Chapter closed.
Contributed by:
IDS Logic