Have you ever had a client who’s on the other side of the world, and you email them in the morning to say “hey, you’re on page one in Google for “britney spears sex tape!”, only to get an email back saying “I just checked and I can’t find us anywhere”. Why is that?
Well, I’m here to tell you… Google localizes. What do I mean by that? Well, Google parses different results to different people based on their IP address. The reason they do this makes perfect sense. If you’re in Montana, and you type in “pizza delivery”, you want to see results near the town you’re in, not pizza places in Vermont. So, how do you get around this?
Proxy IPs. A proxy is a webserver that allows you to “take on” or “tunnel through” to obtain the IP address of that box, basically hiding your own. They’re not always cheap, but there are cheap proxy servers out there if you dig deep enough.
I use proxies often to check the search results in a different town/city, and am always surprised at the differing results I recieve (even when using Google’s “No Region Change” parameter… (* www.google.com/ncr * btw)).