anand84 - 8:25 am on May 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

Geo- and other- targeting is now prevalent. It is core, rather than peripheral. It is no longer results-modification, but results-building

How should one look at this? Definitely, it is helpful if your website caters to people from one particular location since you no longer get non-targeted visitors. But is Google intelligent enough to understand that some websites cater to international audiences and hence need to be shown the same way everywhere? "Dog training" for one is an international theme. And ideally there should only be one particular set of results.

Also, I'm intrigued by the 'CTR' value on search queries in WMT. If Google thinks my link gets the maximum CTR when it is on the third page, it probably pushes my site there even if it is the most targeted result.