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Just wondering if it's possible for Google to have shifted its ranking formula to weight it more international...
ideas? observations?
My best guess:
Google is trying to become THE international search engine.
(seems to me though, if the vast majority of searchers are American, and the vast majority of web sites are American, then the results should reflect that - IMHO)
.com is for everyone - if Google made UK visitors who went to www.google.com go to www.google.co.uk I would not mind so much - but until then .com has to have UK sites.
(seems to me though, if the vast majority of searchers are American, and the vast majority of web sites are American, then the results should reflect that - IMHO)
All things being equal then that should be.
Perhaps we are better at SEO ;)
Notice the ;)
Just did a search for a commonly used UK term on www.google.com and I had the majority being US results - can this be looked into too ;)?
Mind you at least we do have .co.uk perhaps time for a .us
Anyone in a state that lost power noticed they lost significant rank on Google?
Maybe that's a better question for you to ask around on, GoogleGuy, "Are the rankings today being effected by the power outage 2 days ago?"
If this IS true, then I've wasted an awful lot of time the past two days doing keyword research! :(
If so, can you really object to the fact that webmasters from the bottom 95% of the world also have a little success with Google.
Only joking ....
I must say that one of your comments - more than likely without intention - sounds rather racist and not in the good international spirit of the web.
seems to me though, if the vast majority of searchers are American, and the vast majority of web sites are American, then the results should reflect that
Are you talking about Peruvians? Argentinians? Mexicans? Canadians? Cubans? Or perhaps that little strip of land in the middle of North America called the US? I for one do not understand how you can even call yourself American in such an exclusive way when there are millions of other Americans you don't think of!
Next point: .com is an international domain, so why should there not be international results? Perhaps you confuse .com with the not-so-successful .us which is only for the US. There you really should expect only US-American results.
The vast majority of websites is not anymore US-American as far as I know (cross-check with [netcraft.com ] if you feel like it), and also the make-up of your average surfer is not anymore US-American. So, even on a random distribution I would not expect US-sites to forever dominate the results. And especially due to the saturation of the internet in the US I would expect to have non-US sites be more on the business end of town whereas in the US there are mom-and-dad sites up and running with perhaps lower SEO skills. So again, rather a push for non-US sites there.
However, you are correct in wondering why a sudden change happened and if so many people confirm that I'd say a little algo change may be the cause....
Summary: International is good! Go to google.co.us (once it exists) if you want only US-Sites....
That would stuff their results in the country they are targeting of course (on SE's that do a Geo-Filter's)... but a lot of people don't know/care about that.
There are big problems with Geo-Targeting... I don't know how search engines are going to do it effectively. Hosting costs in the US have dropped significantly in the last 12 months or so - while that continues to happen, there will continue to be a higher proportion of non-US sites hosted there. That screws up geo-targeted results everywhere.
"I see the same thing in my keyword phrases. A lot of .de, .be, .au, .uk domains that were never their previously. As a consequence the results are very bad."
(contempt - bad for who? you?! please! ps - don't travel)
Maybe it is because;
a) Webmasters in the UK are more diligent than their cross the pond bros.
b) SEO minded webmasters are the newer guys into the business, who did not buy their domains a millenium ago and therefore do not have the sexy .com domains, but wanted sexy.tld something.
I say good for Google for being impartial (or have the red coats invaded the Googleplex?).
No need to get so defensive. All I'm pointing out is that the results are bad. They were much better before this last dance.
By the way, this forum is a discussion about SEO and changes within Google. Save your pointless comments for another forum.
I have certainly seen a change over the last 24 hours and frankly the change is for the better. Some of our clients have gone up and some down but the results are certainly better for the searcher.
We don't think it is anything to do with the domain extension or hosting location.
What it is who knows!
The worst cases of this I think, are foreign TLD versions of a website that redirect to their regular .com domain. even though the .com doesn't show up in the first 5 SERPs for the term - in other words, widgetcompany.nl and widgetcompany.de are in the SERPs, but widgetcompany.com, (the site they redirect to) is not.
I won't complain about the quality of some of the sites in the SERPs. I don't depend on Google traffic for this business, but I am surprised that some of these sites are beating me. One has no backlinks, and very little text, and is in flash hosted on a
www.(UKinternetprovider).com/subdirectory type site and has PR1 or something like that.
Maybe it's "be nice to international TLDs" month at G. ;)
This is what you said;
"I see the same thing in my keyword phrases. A lot of .de, .be, .au, .uk domains that were never their previously. As a consequence the results are very bad."
It is quite clear what you were saying. So telling me then to save my "pointless comments" I would suggest reflects your own self need to prove that yours are not.
The results are worse, says who? Says you? Jeez, sound the fire bells, call out the National Guard, troyd has spoken.
You never know if we shout load enough we might be able to get to the top without doing any real work - but I am sure it will be easier for you to concentrate on how these international sites have got above you.
The US has a big big advantage on the number of sites and therefore more opportunities for recipricol linking etc and as a consequence US sites should be able to achieve a level of backlinks international sites cant really compete with.
100% behind GrinninGordon on this - results are bad for who?
Google has long left the state of being a US engine - they are a global player if there ever was one. Google is in several countries bigger than in the US.
As to demographics: The majority of internet users comes from non english speaking countries. The US internet population is a minority - of course. Europe alone has an estimated 200 Mill internet users - much more than the US. Nonetheless I suppose the US is the single most important market for Google, with the highest advertising revenue.
Google has been experimenting with geo targeting for quite a while. It might be the case that something with this has gone slightly wrong here.
In any case I would expect Google to move to a US version only or alternatively push further into geo targeting.
The percentage of US sites will further go down steadily in the future - the percentage of sites from Asia, Europe and Latin America is going to rise fast.
Nevertheless we have a worldwide focus and have distribution of our widgets on a worldwide scale.
So I'm very happy about my PR6 and the good positioning my .de-site gets.
The downside is: in google.de our positioning of the German pages is better than in google.com the positioning of the English pages even though the content is identical and the competition is identical too! If that would change along the lines of that thread I'm more than happy!
In all probability they have better looking girls on their sites then on yours, which I think makes Google spot on :-)
Dayo_UK
Generally, newbies come to webmasterworld when?
1) When they are looking to hone their SEO skills?
2) When they searched on Google for "sandlewood scented y-fronts" and Google's bad results put webmasterworld at number one?
3) To help others with their web sites.
4) To b**** and moan that Google's SERPs are bad and coincidently their own site is number 2,456,768 out of 1,237,364!
Sure, I've been there too. But GG agreed with the Hormel I put in my Spam report to him. And none of it was based on where the .tld was / that other country's sites meant their sites were worse than mine.
For people who don't read Japanese or German or Dutch or Korean?
As said before, there are two solutions:
- users use language preferences
- Google puts up a US only site
As it is Google.com is per definition an international search engine indexing the complete www - which personally I think is fantastic and the way it should be.
I think its fine international competition but most adult keywords I can think of are different in different languages. If I search for "Einsteins theory of relativity" I would like english results.If I seach for "Einsteins Theorie der Abh舅gigkeit" then German results.
I dont care what country the site is from or what tld but my search term was english so i expect english results
