UK Site Ranks Better on Worldwide Search...

... for a UK keyword?

[internetheaven]

There are several of my keywords that this seems to be affecting but one of the more major differences is:

If you search 'The Web', my site comes up 13th.
If you search 'UK Sites Only', my site comes up 202nd.

But my site is a .co.uk domain and is hosted on a UK server with a UK IP address. Any clues?

(I ran the searches several times over a period of three days just incase it was a server update)

[tigger]

odd I'm the other way round I rank well on .co.uk but not on .com wanna swap

[glengara]

With a .co.uk, IP address should be immaterial......

Just out of interest, how many of your links are from UK sites?

[tigger]

all

[ChronicFatigue]

I have experienced this in the past with google but only temporarily after fresh content was uploaded.

[djgreg]

Same thing with one of my sites.
It ranks VERY good on .com and co.uk
but on .de where it SHOULD rank good it is only on #7 or so.
I noticed that this is caused by the hl= parameter in the url.
When I set hl=de then my site ranks #7, when I set hl=en my site ranks #1 . Very sad because as my site is in german it is useful to germans ONLY.
I wasn't able to figure out what Google makes think my site is more interesting to english-speaking users.
I tried with meta language="de" but no effect.
The only thing I can think of is links, but I still have more links from german sites than from english ones.
Very cruel!

greg

[internetheaven]

I have this in my head tags:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb">

which should indicate even more that my content is UK oriented. I've just checked and a couple more of my sites which I thought were okay are showing the same 'symptoms'.

I also notice that some of my competitors who are ranked above me on 'UK Sites Only' search are below me in 'Search the Web' searches.

This is a major flaw isn't it? I can't for the life of me think from the reverse side of how Google has made this mistake. Anyone?