Saturday, June 20, 2009 by Al Mackin
The mix up of UK and International results in Google is the talk of the SEO wires. After our blog last week there's been a tonne of posts around the Internet about how this is affecting UK sites. One of the worst examples of this is the term "london safes", which brings up an Australian website as the first results. You'd think that the high bounce rate would have brought that site down from the top position, but it's still up there over a week later.Another troubled keyword is "family homes kent" which returns three American sites in the first five entries. None of the US-sites cater for the UK market, and you have to wonder how many searches for "family home kent" are for Kent, Ohio and how many are for the south east of England. I think the figure for the former will be extremely low, and this defies Google's normal reasoning.
There's been a lot of speculation about why this is happening, and my guess is that it's a combination of factors. It's not uncommon for Google to promote or demote sites depending upon the season, for example "Serviced Apartments Newcastle" brings up more Australian sites during the early half of the year, and Google is known to respond to volume (either in searches, or in a spike in the deemed success, or failure rate of a site) so it could be that a minor algorithm change has combined with some seasonality and volume changes.
Whatever the cause there's some genuine issues with Google SERPs at the moment, at least in the user and search community's eyes, and it will be interesting to find out what the cause of this is.
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