Really strange results

site fluctuating considerably in serps for past 3 months

[dawlish]

I have a site which has been fluctuating considerably with regard to positions in the search listings across all the google data centres. For example, since the major update a few months ago the site in question will appear anywhere between postion 8 and 35 on the various data centers at any one time for a key phrase search that is relevant for my site. However it is not just one phrase, I get this difference in results for every different keyword phrase search I conduct!

There has never been a day in the past 3 months where the positions have been relatively close.

To complicate matters, the site is a UK site with a .co.uk domain. However when you search on www.google.com the site always appears higher in the results than when you search on www.google.co.uk with the UK filter applied. For instance for one phrase the site appears in 11th spot on www.google.com, but in position 34 on www.google.co.uk with the UK filter applied. I would expect the opposite to be the case.

I would much rather the site appeared higher on the .co.uk than on the .com. It makes no sense to me and I have completely run out of ideas.

Has anyone else experienced similar problems? I have a couple of other sites on the server on different subject matters and they all seem fine and the results for these across all datacenters are quite similar and they appear higher on www.google.co.uk as you would expect.

I have always been very careful not to engage in anything that might be regarded as spam and have concentrated on creating content and trying the get quality sites to link to me.

Can anyone offer any advice as it is now beginning to harm my business as most of my visitors are now US rather than UK based. Any advice would be much appreciated.

[dawlish]

Anyone?

[experienced]

Hi,

The site u r talking about hosted on which server. UK or US..? And your other sites are also having the same ext. eg. .co.uk..?

[workinghard]

You mention about where the servers are located. I don't think this makes a huge differance.

I have a .co.uk site hosted in the US with good UK rankings in google with and without the UK filter.

Thanks

[dmorison]

This is probably intentional.

Google are realising that in order to gain credability as a commercial search tool they cannot go around serving up the same result set every time for the same query.

[dawlish]

dmorison - I would agree accept that for my competitors all seem fine. For instance on a .com search my site appears position 12 for a particular search. On www.google.co.uk with the filter applied it appears in position 18th, below some of the sites I was above on .com?

The site is hosted on a US server but has a .co.uk extension. I have a couple of other sites oin the server which are unaffected.

[storevalley]

Hi dawlish ...

Can anyone offer any advice as it is now beginning to harm my business

Have a look at this thread. It makes some extremely good points about the risks of betting the farm on free search engine listings ...

[webmasterworld.com...]

[berli]

The site is hosted on a US server but has a .co.uk extension. I have a couple of other sites oin the server which are unaffected.

Are those other sites also co.uk's? Google is able to do some geographical detection and may score your co.uk worse in UK search because it knows your site is in the US.

[dawlish]

The site has now been hosted on a UK server for over a month (although I don't think being hosted on a US server was the cause of the odd results), but still no improvement on www.google.co.uk results.

On a www.google.com search the site appears in the first page of results for a number of search terms, however when you search on www.google.co.uk with the UK sites filter applied it appears on page 2 or 3 of the results, and behind many of the sites is is appearing above on www.google.com.

The site is a .co.uk and is aimed at a UK audience so this makes no sense at all. Can anyone offer any further advice or ideas? Is anyone experiencing similar results? Do you think it may be worth contacting google?

[dawlish]

One other thing I've noticed....the site is a pr7 but doesn't get any fresh tags and the cached version of the home page only seems to update about once every 4 weeks.