This issue came up as a result of SEO concerns, but having done some further research, it seems Google feels that IP/hosting location are now a weak signal for ranking, at best. So now I'm just curious, as I'm only familiar with networking on a basic level.
I have several sites hosted in the europe-west-1 region. Each site is on a compute engine instance with an external static IP assigned. I can ping the domains/IPs and then have my colleague in the UK ping the same and based on response time it's clear that the IP is ultimately resolving in Europe (probably Dublin, Ireland where it should be). But a DNS lookup of the same domain/IP lists the IP in Mountain View, CA? It always comes out like this: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.bc.googleusercontent.com. Is this Google acting like an ISP, and then the routing to Europe is behind the scenes? Why do none of the IPs show as resolving in the data center where the instances are hosted?
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