Google UK and WebPages From The UK

How does this influence webmaster decisions?

[Simsi]

Whilst monitoring search terms on Google.co.uk and Google.co.uk's "webpages from the UK" I have noticed marked differences in how terms rank. My site is a ".co.uk" and hosted in the UK. I had always assumed that this combination would do better on google.co.uk but it's doing far better when you search only "webpages from the UK".

I would have thought, logically, that the latter is merely a subset of the .co.uk results? If this was the (simple) case, I would expect search terms to correlate between the two: For example, if "blue widgets" was my best search term in the "pages from..." SERPS, I would expect it to be my best search term in the straight .co.uk, although obviouslymaybe lower down the SERPS in light of extra competition, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

Is there more to this than meets the eye?

[edited by: tedster at 9:53 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2007]
[edit reason] fix typo [/edit]

[tedster]

Interesting observation - so clearly with "from the UK" there's a different ranking being applied, and it's not just a subset of the global results. My first theory would be that this is a LocalRank kind of re-shuffling -- where the UK subset of all urls is first isolated, then backlinks between just those urls are weighted more heavily in the final SERP calculation.

Does that line up with what you see?

[glengara]

If you do an allinanchor search in "pages from the UK" the results should more or less correspond to normal search results from PFTUK and in turn be the order in which UK pages appear in the "web search" results.

Over on G.ie for some terms we get Irish pages featuring top ten in the "web search" results but for others you won't find an Irish result in the first five pages, seems to me there's some minimum requirement before "local" results are triggered....

[Simsi]

I think that's unlikely Tedster, but I'll check. The reason I say that is that I haven't cultivated backlinks to that particular site and hence there are no more than a handful of, relatively low quality, links.

As an aside, the MSN results for "UK" and "Pages From The UK", on the same site, behave exactly as you'd expect.

[edited by: Simsi at 9:33 am (utc) on Sep. 20, 2007]