Can the destination country be changed? By this, I mean that if someone looks at the origin of the domain, for example, should it not show Colombia as in my case, but the USA?
I mean, is there any way to change this?
Quite worldwide at the moment, when I look up www.cloudflare.com in the DNS system, I am getting the two IPv6 addresses 2606:4700::6810:7b60 and 2606:4700::6810:7c60, as well as the two IPv4 addresses 104.16.123.96 and 104.16.124.96.
→ iplocation.net: Geolocation for 2606:4700::6810:7b60
→ iplocation.net: Geolocation for 2606:4700::6810:7c60
→ iplocation.net: Geolocation for 104.16.123.96
→ iplocation.net: Geolocation for 104.16.124.96
These IPv6 and IPv4 addresses are, even they are the exact same, being announced from multiple locations across the whole world at the same time using something referred to as anycast, so that an user will (generally) end up on the closest Cloudflare PoP (Point of Presence), depending on the connectivity (and routing policies) that the specific end user ISP has, and where/how the specific end user ISP is able to connect with Cloudflare.
As one single IP address can only have one single set of information (e.g. country, state, city, …) attached at a time, any attempts to use such “geolocation” to determine the actual “destination country” on IP addresses used with anycast, or other sort of multi-homing as well, will always be whacky, if ever successful in any way.
With Anycast, or other kind of multi-homed IP addresses, the most common would be to see the IP addresses as showing up with the country code of the person/organisation that the IP addresses are allocated to.
That being said, - to determine whether the understanding (and thus elaboration above) is correct:
Where (and how) exactly did you see the country that you refer to, as “destination country”, that made you make this thread?
Thank you for your quick and truly expert response.
Here is my situation: I purchased 2 domains from GoDaddy and the DNS redirection to Cloudflare was done from there. The web hosting itself, and therefore the database, is in Hungary, given that I am Hungarian.
For the audit, I use the WebAuditor of link-assistant, for a long time. There it shows that the Country is Colombia. What caught my attention is that my friend also bought the domain from GoDaddy, then moved the DNS to Cloudflare, uses the same Hungarian host, and has the USA listed as the geographic location.
Because of this, I don’t understand what the redirect geolocation is based on, or if it can be changed or requested. Currently, both of my domains point there, which is not convenient for me in some respects.
I attach 1 screenshot.
Maybe it is time to find something else:
Looking at the domain from your screenshot, it indeed looks to be registered through GoDaddy.
Thanks to e.g. GDPR, domain whois have become practically useless these days (e.g. mostly only yielding “redacted for privacy”).
It seems like GoDaddy publishes the follownig data for your domain:
Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
Registrant State/Province: Arizona
Registrant Country: US
Although it mostly became useless, stuff like Country and State/Province are mandatory.
This domain whois stuff would mean that the country code would be United States, if we’re talking only about your domain name.
The WebAuditor screenshot from Link Assistant that you are showing, claims the box to be “Domain info”, but alos list the IP address, just before the country.
So what would the country they’re showing be? Based on the domain? Based on the IP address? …?
What on earth are they actually referring to?
Taking the IP address shown, which claim to be 188.114.96.12, and under the condition that we are looking away from the domain related stuff from above.
→ iplocation.net: Geolocation for 188.114.96.12
Currently, that site appears only to work on my end, with 6 out of 8 of the listed “geolocation databases”, - however, what we see that site claiming, would be that the six databases (at the time of writing this) provides the following data for the given IP address:
→ IP2Location: Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil
→ ipinfo.io: San Francisco, California, United States
→ DB-IP: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
→ IPregistry.co: Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
→ IPGeolocation.io: Los Angeles, California, United States
→ IPapi.co: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
None of those are showing Colombia, as you mentioned, and as your screenshot shows.
That leads me to one thing, -
Contact Link Assistant / WebAuditor, and ask them, like mentioned above, for further clarification whether the country refers to the domain’s registration, or to the location of the IP address retrieved from a DNS lookup, and so on.
Also ask them (Link Assistant / WebAuditor), about which geolocation database that they use as data source.
Unfortunately, no.
Cloudflare cannot do anything here, neither to take up a request, nor to pursue anything, and similar.
Link Assistant / WebAuditor shows something, that given the criteria available / listed, does not make any sense.
One likely scenario would be that Link Assistant / WebAuditor is using an old geolocation database, or otherwise not keeping the data from their geolocation source up-to-date. Such things are seen very often among even large scale organisations out there.
When I am looking at it, it sounds to me like Link Assistant / WebAuditor is some program that you download and install on your PC, … is that correct? If so, you might need to verify that you have updated the software to it’s latest version, which might update the sources as well.
I see two potential ways, if you would make it more convenient though:
Group 1:
- Contact Link Assistant / WebAuditor, and ask them for clarification and resolution etc., but keep in mind that not everything might be technically possible, depending on your wishes.
If that one fails, or otherwise doesn’t end up on being to your satisfaction:
- Stop using Link Assistant / WebAuditor, and find something else.
Group 2:
-
Contact Go Daddy, ask them to list your actual data as registrant data in the WHOIS (e.g. country HU, for Hungary), … which may be privacy invasive for some.
-
Switch your Cloudflare records from Proxied (
) to DNS-only / Unproxied (
).
Note: Any kind of Cloudflare functionality (redirects, page rules, …) will be disabled.
Under the condition that your hosting provider, actually is in Hungary with their services, and that the geolocation of their IP addresses actually responds Hungary, fulfilling all of group #2 should migrate the country code to Hungary at some point in the future.
Whether that “at some point in the future” would takes only just a week, or 30 years to update, would again be depending on the service you use, e.g. Link Assistant / WebAuditor in your case, … but the things should change at some point if you do something like that.
That said, when the IP listed is in some anycast/multi-homing as mentioned above, or otherwise being a part of a CDN provider’s network, I wouldn’t pay attention to the location information at all.
1 Like
Thank you very much for spending your valuable time answering my question and verifying the data.
At first glance, it seems that Link Assistant is probably using some other algorithm to extract the data, which is fine in this case, but overall it might make you wonder.
Looking at the link you sent, it’s clear - if I understand correctly - that the IP address shows that the domain is actually everywhere except where WebAuditor has it listed.
Beyond drawing conclusions, I certainly needed to do a more thorough examination of the particular circumstances available to me, using the instructions I received from you.
This led me to another site, lookip net ( I did not write .- on purpose), where it is also clearly shown that the IP in question is owned by Cloudflare, and that the IP in question is located in 050003 Medellin City, Colombia.
However, given the fact, as you mentioned, that this geolocation cannot be changed, I will either accept this or I will abandon the current application. The fact remains that the Link Assistant is not wrong.
Thanks again for your help, I appreciate your support.
I attach the screenshot.
This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.