For almost 3 months now, as we have reported on a number of occasions, since early June, there have been a lot of US Results showing up in Google UK SERPs, which continued for some time after, leading us to write another post about broken Google UK SERPs.
Earlier this week Emily also posted about the latest Video from Matt Cutts in response to a question from Guavarian, which looked at “why are the UK SERPs still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June”.
Sadly as Emily reported, Matt either attempted to duck this question, or misinterpreted it, and we were not really satisfied with the repsonse that was gained (although it was at least starting to be acknowledged).
Fortunately Matt followed this up with another post on his blog, where he was following up about generic domains in UK results, and admitted in the opening line that he had been given a hard time by some folks that he respected.
However, it does seem that Matt has misinterpreted the question still further, as he is still talking about .com websites appearing in Google UK listings, with some examples given by him such as Tescofinance.com and Churchill.com.
Again, this is missing the point, the issue is that there are still numerous search terms that are displaying results that have no relevance for UK users. Tescofinance.com and Churchill.com have ranked well prior to whatever changed a few months ago – there have always been .com sites that rank well in Google UK, and its quite common for UK sites to be a .com.
However, Matt has commented that there are 2 issues causing the effects that we have been seeing with the foreign sites:
1. They’ve deliberately made changes that make it more likely to see .com websites in the UK. This is where he used the Tescofinance.com and Churchill.com examples, which was a bit of a nonevent, as there were plenty of .com sites that ranked well in the UK, before this update.
2. Mentioning Kiva.org, he said that there were due to an “unrelated ranking experiment” that was going on that was changed.
Matt was kind enough to invite feedback on his blog, and there are a good number of comments on this already, with plenty more examples of areas that are giving cause for concern. Matt has said that the relevant team will be looking at these comments and hopefully take action to resolve these issues.
It does seem that we have finally got an admission from Google that there have been some kind of algorithm tweaks that have been affecting the Google UK results, which is at least a sign that progress is being made. The results in general have been a bit tidier in the last few days, and hopefully with the issue now acknowledged and with plent of examples given as feedback to Matt, we should hopefully be rid of the irrelevant sites that are coming up all over the place.
Pete Handley
Campaign Delivery Manager
Related posts:
- Once everyone’s friend, is Google starting to become a victim of their own success?
- Google shows the importance of SEO for Travel Sites
- Adding to your listings in Google with Google News
- Video Google Sitemaps, is this the start of Google indexing video content from normal sites?
- MSN offers a useful SEO tool for locating sites hosted on same IP
