It’s been a good few weeks since the 11th June when I last posted about US results showing up in Google UK SERPs, and ever since we have been waiting it out in the hope that this would be a temporary blip.

At the time I was mentioning about US websites appearing in the listings – but after looking at this more closely in recent weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not just US websites that are appearing here – it’s just foreign English language websites – although there are more US websites than most other countries, I’ve frequently been finding Australian and New Zealand websites mixed in with UK listings.

The example I used at the time was on a search for “Family Homes Kent”, which had a map with lots of local results. This map was accurate, and it had links to relevant websites in the UK. The listing previously looked like this:

All of the top ranking web pages for this search term at this time were US websites – which really doesn’t make any sense – I am a UK searcher, potentially looking for a family home in Kent, and although due to the map there are some results based from the UK (which really proves that Google has some inkling as to what I want to find based on my search), none of these options answer my query and under those circumstances, I want to see a number of results of people selling a home in Kent.

These results offer me that – as long as I don’t mind Kent not being in the UK.

Searching for the same term today, there are at least 3 sites that are UK based:

Broken UK Serps

But this is still 7 listings that are of no interest to me and are not relevant to the search term that I searched with.

Some more examples of this include:

Fence Post

Top result – rural New Zealand website – why is this site top of the listings for this phrase? Surely someone is looking to buy a fence post here – in the UK?

Buy Guitar Pedal

3 of the top 4 results are US websites:

Dining out:

Top 2 results are South African site:

I’m not saying this because some of my sites have been hit as a result of this – a few have, but for the most part a lot of my sites are ranking well and still gaining traffic from those rankings.

However, this is not good for Google’s credibility – especially when there is also a lot of talk about trials being run on Google Chrome where the radio buttons for “the web” and “pages from the UK” look like they may be removed, making it more difficult to refine your search results in light of these problems.

With the problems we are seeing with Google listings at the moment, removing the option to search for UK based pages is only going to exacerbate this issue. It’s important for us to keep an eye on this, as the implications for lots of websites SEO could potentially be massive.

I have seen a reduction in the impact of these sites – they certainly don’t seem to be quite as common on page 1 as they have been, but there are still plenty of examples of this, and there is still no acknowledgement from Google of this issue.