I have heard some chatter that the results have reverted back, however almost two weeks later I am surprised to say that the geo problems in the UK SERPS still exist. The UK search results are as bad as I have seen them, they are quite simply shocking in terms relevancy for a UK audience. The Google.com results from the UK (IP) have always been more of a half way house between UK/US results and now these results seem to be even more US focused aswell.

I recently asked Matt to comment, but he choose not to respond which is fair enough. It’s difficult to know the cause of this change, a tweak in the geo algo or some have suggested problems with Googles link graph due to a massive UK ISP hack. Lets take a look at some of the results where we can highlight the problem that still exists.

A search for ‘web hosting’ on Google UK brings back a number of US sites in the top 10. Webhostinggeeks.com which compares a load of US web hosting companies with all prices in dollars is 7th. Justhost.com is 8th which may look like a UK site with a quick glance (if you look from the UK as it’s delivering price/phone number by IP) but you can see from Googles cache its very much a US site in their eyes. Webhostingstuff.com again another US site takes up the 10th spot on the 1st page.

The 2nd page of results is much worse and really shows the scale of the issue.

Webhostingsearch.com, Webhosting.info, Findmyhosting.com, Webhostingrally.com, Hostseeq.com, Envisionwebhosting.com and Webhostingratings.com are all US sites now ranking in the UK results.

So out of the top 20 results for ‘web hosting’, 10 of them are US based sites with US prices. That’s 50% of the results with a US bias. Even more scary is that every single one of the sites on the 2nd page is basically an affiliate comparison site.

Sure some visitors from the UK will be willing to pay on their credit card in dollars for a (sometimes) cheaper web host as often people don’t care where it’s hosted.  You could argue (badly) that Google has decided that for this query, UK searchers habits have shown that US sites derserve their positioning as it’s still relevant? Ok, so lets look at another example for ‘flowers‘ -

The first page results are actually not to bad with a lot of UK results. But the 2nd page again is where the problems are obvious. In 15th position there is 800florals.com and just below 1800flowers.com. These are both US sites, with US prices which only deliver within The States and Canada. What exactly are they doing in the UK results? At the same time well known relevant online UK florists such as Arenaflowers, Flyingflowers, Debenhams and Bunches sit below them.

A search for ‘SEO’ on Google.co.uk now pulls back SEO.com a US based SEO agency in 8th position. On the 2nd page we now have Aaron Walls Seobook.com and SEOmoz.org. Both great sites in their own right with good content, but they have appeared from nowhere knocking UK based content further down the listings. It’s not just US sites either, there are some examples of Australian sites ranking higher (not as high as US sites) for generic phrases or for longer tail, less competitive queries.

So the questions are, is this a test? Were these changes made on purpose and are Google working on the issue?  The answers would be no, no and hopefully yes.

While Webmasters and Google UK users are scratching their heads at the poor SERPS, Bings results are looking comparatively much better.

Even for their own sites.

Only seems to be Premiership clubs currently. Cool.

Update – Google have now added last game results alongside the next fixture. As below -

Interesting to see which pages Google chose. The Amy Alexandra post was just a little testing I did for fun and was certainly not one of my most linked to pages, but traffic wise its been pretty big…

Check out the screen shot below.

A larger screen shot can be found here.

So what implication might this have on paid listings? The adverts on the right hand side have certainly been pushed further down the page.

Is that cool or a bit geeky?!

I’ll let you decide.

Most of you will already know that PageRank is updated continually and incorporated within scoring by Google, so toolbar PR is effectively old by the time it reaches here.

“As always, don’t expect traffic or rankings to dramatically change, because these PageRank values are already incorporated into our scoring. The same quarterly-ish data push that updates PageRank in the toolbar also updates the data for related:, link: and info: (remember that operator?)”.

I gave them a hard time a couple of weeks back which was picked up at the SEroundtable & I followed this up with a few more thoughts. Matt Cutts replied with a couple of amusing comments;

“I don’t have any inside insight on this, but maybe someone saw that Yahoo was doing tips and getting *less* grief than if they’d bought ads. ;) Barry, take your article and substitute the word “Yahoo” for “Google”. Now why didn’t you write that article? :) Because they’ve done it for years. :)”

A few more thoughts from Matt can be seen at his blog. I think Google do get a bit of a rough deal in comparison to the other search engines. Why? Simply because there is that much more expectation for Google to do no evil, so to speak. We expect it elsewhere, so its like a complement in many ways to Google.

Update – Matt has confirmed the tip removal over at the Blake Ross blog;

There’s a binary push going on that and the tips are removed in that binary push. It will take a few days before the binary makes it out to every data center. Blake, thanks for your feedback on this issue.

Matt Cutts has answered the question by denying any algo update. However, he did explain the differences between an algorithm update, data refresh and index update -

Algorithm update: Typically yields changes in the search results on the larger end of the spectrum. Algorithms can change at any time, but noticeable changes tend to be less frequent.

Data refresh: When data is refreshed within an existing algorithm. Changes are typically toward the less-impactful end of the spectrum, and are often so small that people don’t even notice. One of the smallest types of data refreshes is an:

Index update: When new indexing data is pushed out to data centers. From the summer of 2000 to the summer of 2003, index updates tended to happen about once a month. The resulting changes were called the Google Dance. The Google Dance occurred over the course of 6-8 days because each data center in turn had to be taken out of rotation and loaded with an entirely new web index, and that took time. In the summer of 2003 (the Google Dance called “Update Fritz”), Google switched to an index that was incrementally updated every day (or faster). Instead of a monolithic monthly event, the Google would refresh some of its index pretty much every day, which generated much smaller day-to-day changes that some people called everflux. Over the years, Google’s indexing has been streamlined, to the point where most regular people don’t even notice the index updating. As a result, the terms “everflux,” “Google Dance,” and “index update” are hardly ever used anymore (or they’re used incorrectly :) ). Instead, most SEOs talk about algorithm updates or data updates/refreshes. Most data refreshes are index updates, although occasionally a data refresh will happen outside of the day-to-day index updates. For example, updated backlinks and PageRanks are made visible every 3-4 months.

This pretty much suggests any movement we are currently seeing is a data refresh of somekind.

Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try Blogger

These appear above the natural search results for any blog related search queries as seen below -

As you can see, Googles own ‘Blogger’ product is now occuping 3 seperate spots within ‘blog’ related search queries, top of paid listings, then there’s the ‘tip’ and finally Bloggers organic listing in 3rd place.

I think this is pretty interesting as it was only recently that there was an argument discussion about the ethical & competitive nature of ‘Google advertising on Google‘. Matt Cutts actually replied to this piece and made some negative remarks around Yahoo hard coding their links previously into organic results;

“…I agree that buying ads where other people can outbid you is much better than hard-coding the search results page to favor someone. That’s what Yahoo does with searches like [online advertising]. If you click, you’ll see that Yahoo hard-codes links with a logo just above the search results: “Online Advertising Solutions on Yahoo! Small Business.” So instead of buying an ad, Yahoo just takes the screen real estate with no possibility of competition.”

So is this fair?

Danny Sullivan has no problem with Google hard coding their products in this way, but this seems to be under the pretence that Google therefore don’t take up places within paid search aswell -

“By making this a tip rather than promoting Blogger in ad units, Google avoids the entire debate of whether it pays for its ads fairly or not “.

From where I am, Google are taking up any spots they want.

What do you think?