UK search

[dawlish]

A couple of my sites seems to have lost position when I search across all nine datacenters, one is a hobby site and is not commercial in anyway, the other is very commercial and operates in a competitive sector. What is stange however is that when I search for the most important phrase the site is positioned between 9 and 31 across the 9 datacenters.

However the site is a .co.uk and when I use the uk filter on www.google.co.uk the site appears below some of the sites it was beating in the .com search, even when you take the worst case scenario of position 31. Can anyone explain this?

[EarWig]

Dawlish

The only reason I can think is, that wherever the .co.uk results are taken from, (I have no idea on this) they are not yet using the new SERP's from the other centres.

Wait till this update is complete and check again.

Hope this helps

Regards
EW

[batdesign]

I don't think this is related the recent updates. I've seen this discrepancy between .com and .co.uk serps well before DomEsme.
One particular .co.uk site that ranks well in google.com has far worse serps for an identical search on google.co.uk

Makes no sense, but there you go...more people use google.com anyway, so as long as you rank better in .com searches it's not worth worrying about!

[taxpod]

edit

[johnser]

As an aside, some stats I saw 3/4 months ago (maybe here?) said the UK filter on .co.uk was giving 8% of sites traffic on average.

Don't know how accurate that is.
J

[makemetop]

.co.uk sites hosted in the US can get a slight demotion on Google.co.uk filtered results over other UK hosted sites. So a number 2 on Google.com comes out at a number 3 on Google UK when you expect it to be #1. This may not be your situation but it seems to be true.

I've got one site exactly like that!

[tigger]

Agree with MMT, I had a .com UK site hosted in the US that wasn't showing on .co at all moved it to a UK hosting company now it's starting to show, where as before it was nowhere to be found

[UK_Web_Guy]

Dawlish

I am seeing exactly the same problem as you.

Site is and always has been hosted in UK, and ranked fine until Dominic - now, site ranks well on .com or .co.uk search for all web,

But, when filtered to UK only rank is nowhere.

[instand1]

UK_Web_Guy,
sometimes the site is hosted in UK but the range of IP-Addresses of the Hosting-Company is mostly US based. Maybe the hosting-company in UK is part of an US based network?

[vincevincevince]

i've a site hosted outside of the UK, on a block outside of the UK, with a .co.uk domain name, but no content specific to the UK (at present).

i get into the UK only serps fine.

[dawlish]

I'm still seeing bizarre results for a particular site.
Search on .com for phrase = postion 12th
Search on .co.uk with UK filter = postion 18th

This does not make any sense and for one phrase I search on .co.uk, the index page for my site actually shows up at postion 9th and 25th - a duplicate listing?
I have never seen this before. Any ideas?

[g1smd]

Anyone in here ever used [google.gg...] or [google.je...] for UK results?

[dawlish]

Since my original post I have been monitoring a number of .co.uk sites across different industry sectors.

What I have found is some sites appear lower
for a search on .co.uk than they do for a search on .com, in fact they appear below some of the sites they were appearing above on .com!

What originally brought this to my attention was that it was happening to one of my sites. However I have based my findings below on sites other my own.

Site 1 - solicitors
search for keyword phrase 1
www.google.co.uk position 22
www.google.com position 14

search for keyword phrase 2
www.google.co.uk position 34
www.google.com position 17

Site 2 - accommodation
search for keyword phrase 1
www.google.co.uk position 35
www.google.com position 32

search for keyword phrase 2
www.google.co.uk position 22
www.google.com position 21

Site 3 - finance
search for keyword phrase 1
www.google.co.uk position 26
www.google.com position 21

search for keyword phrase 2
www.google.co.uk position 22
www.google.com position 21

Site 4 - entertainment portal
search for keyword phrase 1
www.google.co.uk position 33
www.google.com position 28

search for keyword phrase 2
www.google.co.uk position 27
www.google.com position 25

There are a number of others I have been following which show similar behaviour, although there are equally many others which seem to be ranked as you would expect.

I cannot seem to find a pattern although some of the sites which are appearing lower on .co.uk have "UK" in the page title and in a H1 tag. However there are also sites which appear as normal which also have "UK" in the page title and H1 tags.

Is anyone else seeing or experiencing similar findings?

Anything to do with .co.uk websites hosted in the US?

One further idea I had was maybe google was looking for over optimisation and then applying a dampening factor for that keyword / phrase? This may well produce the results. For instance if the algo determined that a site should be 10 places lower for in the results due to over optimisation they may well appear position 20 on www.google.com and position 19 on www.google.co.uk.

Take this scenario:
search phrase 1
www.google.com: site listed position 20. Of the 19 above 10 were US sites.

You would therefore expect the site to appear in position 9 on www.google.co.uk?

However if a dampening factor of 10 positions was applied then they may appear in postion 19 and as a consequence lower than some of the sites it was beating on .com?

[dawlish]

I'm still seeing odd results for one site in particular. When you search on www.google.com for keyword phrase 1 the site is listed 12th. When you search on www.google.co.uk with the UK filter applied the site is listed 25th? The site resides on a UK server and has a .co.uk domain name, therefore you would expect it to be higher than where it is listed on the .com site.

This makes no sense? Is anyone else experiencing similar results or can anyone provide any insight as to what might be causing this. It has been some weeks now.

[caine]

try searching on Google within different browsers, they present or google does different serps to browsers.

Check out opera v IE
netscape v IE
mozilla v opera

Its ashame G can't show bad - and unfortunate client side based scripts that don't parse properly across all browsers (bad veiwing for searchers). I always get the feeling that Google is already in bed with microsoft becuase of that. Can't blame them of course the browser marketplace is swung that way at the moment.

BTW - G.co.uk maybe using waiting of incoming and outgoing and cross-linking of a .co.uk site that is pertinent to the UK. Big market - up and coming - makes sense to differentiate markets - more money!