Google.co.uk Search Results are F**ked
Who the f**k is messing with the google.co.uk results? It appears Google UK search results are being flooded by totally irrelevant search results. The biggest problem appears to be that websites are not targeting the correct country. A search for ‘pet insurance’ in Google.co.uk show us sites related to pet insurance but there is no way they are at all relevant to the UK.
These changes were first noticed at the end of April/early May with conclusive results coming when a major update took place on June 4th. This update brought a large number of non-UK results into the Google.co.uk search results. Some results have been so bad that they have brought up pages which are not even in English.
Some say that to counter the problem searches can simply use the radio button ‘pages from the UK’ whilst searching but it is unclear whether it helps as the anomaly results are already deemed to be from the UK and super relevant. The truth is a lot of surfers do not actually know what the button does and so will just see hugely irrelevant search terms suddenly appearing.
Google has come under pressure from Microsoft’s newly formed Bing.com which was originally dismissed as a novelty but has begun to prove that it offers fairly good search results.
We’ve already seen before that Google has tried to put more emphasis on brand names and highly authoritative sites which has caused them to rank above the more relevant but slightly smaller sites.
Google has a huge chunk of the search market, even more so in the UK where it commands 80% of the user market.
Matt Cutts tried to address the situation but the general consensus is that he completely avoided the original question. He went on to explain that many sites relevant to the UK have .com TLDs which is not what the problem is. People are entirely happy to see .com domains rank in google.co.uk but only if they are relevant. We don’t want rankings specific to the U.S to appear in the UK search results.
Another example is this: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB303GB303&q=police+retirement+figures&btnG=Search&meta=
How helpful are some of those results to someone who is in the UK!!
For the query “tennis courts for rent”, fccsingapore.com shouldn’t rank number one because it’s in Singapore. The rest of the sites are then based in the Dominican Republic, Chennai, Chicago, Spain, Memphis and Portland. Trovit.co.uk is a welcomed exception though.
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