US maps in UK search results – can you get them removed from your listing in Google?

Recently, there have been lots of complaints about irrelevant US websites showing up in Google.co.uk search results.

Pete first blogged about this in June, when a search for family homes kent produced 7 US sites in the first page of listings.

Since then, examples like this are harder to find. This suggests that Google have sorted some of the problems. But some people are still reporting issues.

US maps issue

There’s also been problems with rogue US maps appearing under specific UK results.

For example, I’ve just done a search for pubs in Plymouth. One of the results looked like this:

The links says it all – this is a page about pubs in Plymouth, Devon, UK. But the map is for a Plymouth Rock Trail in Alabama, USA. Odd.

It’s great that Google are trying to make search results more useful. But results like this don’t help anyone.

And if a map like this appears with your website’s listing in Google it’s a hardly going to inspire confidence and encourage click-throughs.

Getting these maps removed

So how can you get rid of one of these maps from your website’s listing in Google.co.uk?

Until Google sorts these issues, the answer to that is that we don’t know. There’s no option in Google Maps Help to report these issues.

We have however seen some of these map issues fixed. But they were ‘high profile’ cases – i.e. blogged about and reported on Matt Cutts’ blog about the UK SERPs.

So that leaves 2 options:

• Report the issue to Google using the ‘Dissatisfied? Help us improve’ link at the bottom of the SERPs.
• Start a discussion in the Google Maps Help Forum (rumour has it that Google regularly monitor these discussions and fix any problems that are reported).

An experiment

I’ve got two more examples of rogue US maps for UK search listings. Instead of making a fuss about them now, I’m going to try each of the above methods to see if it works to get the maps removed.

I’ll do a follow up blog to let you know how I do.

In the meantime, if you know of a better way, let us know – you can get in touch with us on Twitter.

Tom Hallett
Campaign Delivery Manager

Related Posts

1. US maps in Google UK SERPs – still no resolution
2. Getting a local listing in Bing Maps
3. Pointless maps cluttering Google SERPs
4. Broken Google UK SERPs
5. Local results in Google maps added by users
6. Get into the Google Maps for Free!
7. Starting to get Answers from Google about Foreign Sites in UK listings
8. Google Maps now gives you UK Traffic Information

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 11:07 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.