robertahare
New Member
The company I work for is planning on relaunching our website using a Global Load Balancing solution to ensure site visitors from around the world are directed to the geographically closest web server to ensure content loads as quickly as possible. The Global Load Balancing is achieved by customizing the DNS response sent back to the requester and providing only the IP address for the closest web server. If you access the site from different regions of the USA or around the world you will get 1 of 4 IP addresses. Our Marketing and SEO teams are concerned that if Google (and the other search engines) see the domain responding from more than a single IP address our rankings will suffer as each IP address will be viewed as a separate site - thus we would have 4 sites with duplicate content. Is this really a significant issue? Are there technical work arounds if this is an issue? What about using htaccess to test for the the useragent names and redirect all traffic from the bots to a specific IP address of one of the servers? If you are going after regionalized phrases, you might have issues, otherwise, load balancing is normal for large sites. Quote: Originally Posted by pontifixx 
load balancing is normal for large sites. Agreed. Load balancing is normal for large sites. Sites like facebook and myspace exist many places in different datacenters and they get indexed fine. I host a number of servers for an adult service. He's in five datacenters and he gets indexed fine.
heck Google has many datacenters and they get indexed fine.
The only concern would be if you were using different domain names with the same content. You're using the one domain name and spreading out the load. Hello,
Thanks for your post.
This is very helpful.
One more question.
Do other issues come into play if some of the data centers are located outside the country?
Will a load balancing server in Germany, China, and Egypt negatively impact US rankings or is this still going to be viewed as a US site by Google? Not that I'm aware of although I don;t have any experience with out of country server locations.
Again, Google gets indexed fine and they have servers all over the place.
load balancing is normal for large sites. Agreed. Load balancing is normal for large sites. Sites like facebook and myspace exist many places in different datacenters and they get indexed fine. I host a number of servers for an adult service. He's in five datacenters and he gets indexed fine.heck Google has many datacenters and they get indexed fine.
The only concern would be if you were using different domain names with the same content. You're using the one domain name and spreading out the load. Hello,
Thanks for your post.
This is very helpful.
One more question.
Do other issues come into play if some of the data centers are located outside the country?
Will a load balancing server in Germany, China, and Egypt negatively impact US rankings or is this still going to be viewed as a US site by Google? Not that I'm aware of although I don;t have any experience with out of country server locations.
Again, Google gets indexed fine and they have servers all over the place.