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It used to be that a search on google.co.uk would bring up similar, results to google.com, but with a .co.uk domain extension bias. (very simplified I Know). The Local results , then gave only .co.uk results.
Now it seems that instead of picking on the domain extension, they are picking the hosting location but for the local results only. There are more .coms in the results, and they are it seems all UK based companies.
About time I say! However the down side :) (isn't there always one?) seems to be that searching on google.co.uk, and not selecting the local results, will often give nothing but US companies.
From an informational/academic point of view, this is fine. From a shopping / business point of view, I suspect it will take time for people to learn how to use this.
It strikes me, that many companies will be signing up for adwords too, if they are no longer to be seen on the main .co.uk listing.
Anyone else seem something similar, or is it just me?
George
G.
I was looknig for info on a car, a peurgeot 406 the other day and was irritated by the french and german pages. I thought google were trying to make us use the local searches more, but what can you do in the US... except advance search?
I am not sure I like these new filters, but I am sure there is a good reason. Anyone with a why to help us understand the results better?
George
edit-g, would you sticky me your site? I might have a suggestion.
George
"It used to be that a search on google.co.uk would bring up similar, results to google.com, but with a .co.uk domain extension bias. (very simplified I Know). The Local results , then gave only .co.uk results."
No, this never was the case.
Google looks at domain extension AND/OR hosting location to select results for a regional search. A .com has always appeared in regional searches if hosted in that country. Alternatively, we have a .co.uk site hosted in the states.... no difference in rankings recently.
I don't believe it will ever filter and prioritise the hosting location above the domain ending. Too many sites host in the U.S. that are UK relevant to be ignored. AOL has been giving priority to .co.uk endings in 'UK only' searches with their imported google results and it produces rubbish results.
"About time I say! However the down side (isn't there always one?) seems to be that searching on google.co.uk, and not selecting the local results, will often give nothing but US companies."
I see no difference here... been like this for months. A worldwide search produces more .com's because there are more .com's than anything else. There may be a lot of U.S. sites appearing but that is normal.... there is no regional or domain ending bias in worldwide searches.
I hope they never make hosting location more important than the domain ending.... that would be crazy, the U.S. benefit from companies hosting there!
Also I'm not too sure if the IP targeting, which may actually be a nameserver targeting, will not become a major factor with Google.
I seriously think the whole Google db can get filtered upon request for IP/nameserver location.
It is/was in effect at AOL.
Another interesting tidbit in this discussion is the .us domain which obviously will require hosting located in the US.
One main problem for all search engines trying to go for geo targeting is the US market, which is dominated by the .com and other generic TLDs.
So what kind of filter would be possible to apply if a search engine would try to deliver US only results?
Language is not a possiblity. TLd neither. IP/hosting location in a way would be an option, though a very very crappy one.
So what kind of filter would be possible to apply if a search engine would try to deliver US only results? Language is not a possiblity.
I think, language could be a possibility ... allthough i don't know if it perfectly works to localize US and UK content based on language. For all other languages it should be possible: Google has a large keyword index. If they'd refine their index by phonetic samples or spelling characteristics (think they allready do - think of the spell checker) they should be able to localize french, german, english, spanish ... sites. As far as i know, quite every language has its own phonetic signature. I guess there are also a few phonetic differences between US and UK ...
Yes, it depends on content text ... flash is somewhat international ... hard to localize ;)
The question is rather how useful is filtering for languages for geo targeting purposes?
Think Spanish...You have
>Spain
>whole of South America, with the exception of Brazil
>a large percentage of US users
>people all over the world.
If a search engine tries to deliver local results this does not work for some of the most important most widely used languages. Which becomes very obvious with English.
Also, I have never come across other languages on searches, except for the most off beat words I had never heard of, and then I discover mean something in Swahili or Portuguese.
Our .co.uk sites in the USA perform nicely on google.co.uk at present...
I tend towards your view heini. Google are not bothered about the US hosting business, and over the last 12 months the web has been steadily regionalised, with more and more country specific results, (or so they suggest). Why else bother having www.google.co.uk?
As for language search, surely that has to be the first filter, before any geo filter. Linguists are in the minority. Most people have a strength in one language, and it seems that that is how results have been split up to now... Which is what makes the current results seem so strange.
In the end, I guess it is all impressions, as there are so many variables, but I think these are reasonable points to deduce.
George
I think we agree about the current situation, except I don't think its a new google algo to put .com's in the UK only search. This has always been the case. There's been previous discussions about this, going back quite a long time!...e.g. [webmasterworld.com...]
However, here are my current positions with regards to my .co.uk site hosted in the states:
Results for a competative search term:
Aol (google results with their own filter) UK only - Position 11
Aol worldwide - Position 60
So AOL likes the domain ending.... ignores host.
Google.co.uk UK only - Position 16
Google.co.uk Worldwide - Position 62
Google.com - Position 62
Google likes domain ending and also hosting location.
The main difference between AOL (UK only) and Google (UK only) is that AOL filter out all .com results, whereas Google keeps them in if they are hosted in the UK.
In various worlwide searches I have done, with search terms common to both U.S. and U.K., the results seem to ignore host location and domain ending, in other words, it's a level playing field. Search for "teaching jobs" on google.co.uk and .com.... there is a good sprinkling of .co.uk sites in both.
I cannot see a way that Google would give preference to a .co.uk which is also hosted in the UK for a 'UK only' search. It appears to look for either a .co.uk or host location to be in the reckoning, and from then on other ranking factors kick in. I cannot see that hosting location alone will ever be a factor, there are too many valid reasons why a site targeted at a UK audience would choose to host in the States. We are a good example of this, we use software only available on lease from a U.S. hosting firm.
AOL are just plain stupid to filter out .com's from their 'UK only' searches. They assume .com means 'worldwide' or even 'U.S.' which it doesn't. Google results using the hosting location method and/or domain ending works very well and the results are relevant.
I have been monitoring other competitors with .com sites for many months and unfortunately some have always done well in UK only searches. :(
As a further thought.... We have a .com site hosted in the UK with loads of links in and 500 pages. We also have the .co.uk domain on a seperate server, which has a different looking single page, linking into the .com's internal pages. A few months ago (June) we accidently duplicated the .co.uk and .com index pages. Google visited both, dumped all the 500 .com pages and took the single .co.uk page.... why?.... because it had to make a choice between the two duplicated domain index pages and must have decided on the .co.uk because of host location. So, interestingly, google would prefer to resolve hosts to country specific domain endings if it can, rather than keeping a more established .com version. This suggests it primarily works on domain ending for resolving location.
Heini -
" astonishing differences between results for travel/location searches depending on language setting in the search string were observed.
Those differences are still there."
I don't understand what you mean by 'langauge setting',?
"I seriously think the whole Google db can get filtered upon request for IP/nameserver location.
It is/was in effect at AOL."
It isn't... thats the point. They just use domain ending, not ip/nameserver.
For an explanation see this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Thanks Heini and vitaplease
Interesting....
I can find my site in position 1 on every google around the world (worldwide search) except for google.nl where it does not appear! Other sites in these serps consistantly appear... also appearing in google.nl
The only possible theory I have is 'links in'. I don't think I have a link in from a site hosted outside the UK. On a regional google, perhaps google are considering for worldwide searches, sites need to have worldwide links? This could be being tested on google.nl at the moment?
The 'links in' theory could define local searches as well. If a search is done in france for local sites and google has to choose between two .com sites, one with 100 .fr links in and the other with none....guess which one it will choose! Nothing to do with language or location of server, but good old 'votes' from other sites.
or perhaps not! ......I'm confused.
google.nl - the Dutch can be a confusing lot ;)
if you mean with links to that page, that it is more important for google.com than for google.local I agree [webmasterworld.com].
Another theory could be where (which country) those links have to come from.
That is, for those travel location searches e.g. it helps to get a link from a Greek site to rank high for a Greek term in the Greek Google version (if Google.greece would exist..)
But I did not check that.
I think google will do this:
1) Worlwide searches (from any location) - Google will give priority to sites linked from many differing countries. These will be assumed to be truely global sites. The linking sites will have their location determined from ip address and tld. Then all the other factors kick in, such as anchor text etc.
2) Local searches will give priority to tld and/or ip address, and also number of local links in from that locality. So in the netherlands, a .com with many .nl or dutch ip adresses linked to it, will do well, even if it is hosted in the states.
I think google may be testing this on google.nl. This would explain why my site with no global links in, does not feature on the worldwide search.
Hosting location will only be considered for non location specific tld's. I think even this will become less important, and local links in will count more for ranking in 'local' searches.
That would be a sensible move IMHO !
The problem Google has is in trying to establish a U.S. based search. At the moment there is only www.google.com/unclesam which is hardly used. They will have to encourage the use of .us domains, as they cannot assume .com is American. Also, they cannot convert google.com to be an American bias search, because .com is established as a non location specific domain. I suspect we will see the introduction of google.us which will have a local search facility, based on the same principles as outlined above.
Exactly. That's were I was going at in my above message.
Only I'm not sure about the principle of putting local links into the equation.
Fact is, the complete Google database is sortable for IP/hosting location at this point. They have this info attached to each listing. That's where we're at.
Also we see Google start returning different results for some search areas. Mostly those seem to be location related searches.
This does not happen at Google.nl only, it's been observed at different local Googles.
Actually this effect can be reproduced at Google.com, just by changing the users preferred browsing language (not the language of the results).
> introduction of google.us
A prediction that has been made for quite a while. As far as I can remember the first to come up with that was NFFC.
Cannot blame him :)
This is where I see a dramatic change:
I Know a .net site, with great listings everywhere except uk local results! Ouch, as they have just disappeared.
Why... well my guess is that the site is hosted in Germany (cheap you see, as he uses 10G of bandwidth, and growing quite nicely.) There is little on the site that has changed to make this difference, so I can only assume it is Google. It is not a travel site either.
Perhaps all these options are taken into account, ie
Domain extension
hosting local
links
language (nearly forgot it)
etc,
If there was a broad filter on all of these, then that would explain the results.
IE if you are a co.uk hosted in germany, fine, but if you are .net in germany, then you really have no place in a UK local listing.
I think I have probably stopped making sense!
George
1. Local search
You want to be listed in the local Google search with the option button "pages from the UK".
You then need to be hosted in the UK or have a .co.uk tld (and maybe some other factors)
Webmaster trying to reach UK searchers are quite lucky though, as from what I understood from the UK-members at the Pubconference, when you type in Google.com you are not automatically redirected towards Google.co.uk as in other countries. (that explains the relatively very low google.co.uk referals [webmasterworld.com] I see in my log stats).
The "pages from the UK" option could lead to an inflation in local url's if it catches on.
2. Different ranking results but the same index between normal Google.com searches and normal Google.tld (foreign) searches (not the pages from country)
From recent posting these seem to occur with location and travel oriented search queries (some also quoted adult)
The local Google seem to put importance on "on-page-data" whereas the main Goolge.com will put heavy ranking importance for pages receiving links containing the search query in anchortext or surrounding text.
As mentioned earlier, I can sticky an example of the above.
I agree with all the above...except....
Re Heini...
>Fact is, the complete Google database is sortable for IP/hosting location at this point. They have this info attached to each listing. That's where we're at.
I think they will only ever use this information to identify location relevancy for .com's etc. I think that has been the case for a long time.
re Vitaplease
>The local Google seem to put importance on "on-page-data" whereas the main Goolge.com will put heavy ranking importance for pages receiving links containing the search query in anchortext or surrounding text.
Possibly, but I think the location of sites 'linking in' also now has an effect on local searches. For instance, a .com hosted in the states has until now had no chance in a UK only search, even with good optimised page content, unless the search is a non competative one. Now, if it has a lot of UK sites linking in to it, it will do well. That seems to me to be an improvement.
I would be surprised if anchor text was less important for local searches than global... what would be the rational for that?
George -
Did the .net hosted in Germany ever do well on UK only searches?... especially competative ones? If it did, it must have been appearing due to page content only. Either google now dislikes the page content, or the shift has been towards emphasis on location of host and/or location of links in.
I think Google should help us here. This is not really a ranking discussion. We really need to know if having a foreign hosting company puts us in the game or out. If they are choosing ip location as an overriding indicator of regional relevance, then they might be missing a lot of good quality sites!
MHes:
> Too many sites host in the U.S. that are UK relevant to be ignored.
I would agree with that. Unfortunately there are major changes to searches with the Google interface set to something other than English. For the travel related searches that heini refers to, the domain doesn't seem to matter.
Search for hotel YourCountry with and without adding &hl=de to the end (where YourCountry is in Europe). The differences are significant. Though not 100%, the correlation between these changes and RIPE data is compelling.
heini:
> IP/hosting location in a way would be an option, though a very very crappy one.
Yes, the apparent fascination with geolocation toys is unfortunate.
I see the point with AdWords, because IPs correlate fairly well to ISP users (and advertisers like that kind of thing). Webservers, however, do not correlate well to the location of the subject matter.
MHes:
> If they are choosing ip location as an overriding indicator of regional relevance, then they might be missing a lot of good quality sites!
Indeed.
i.e. if a site is listed in a regional UK category on Yahoo and Dmoz and a significant proportion of the inbound linking sites are also in UK regional cats, wouldn't the site rank well in gg uk.
Haven't done much research into this, may be someone has who could tell us a bit more
I am yet to come across anyone who has found any positive results when trying to test an ODP regionality influence on Google search listings.
I'd love to know what Google think of this method. Maybe their user testing shows that people like these odd travel results, or maybe they'll quietly switch back.
what about Yahoo and GG directory listings? Wouldn’t this effect the regional placement
...it is similar to what Mhes was suggesting, that links in affect the local listings. It would make some sense.
The site I have a problem with is listed in a top level in DMOZ, not a local level, so could be excluded from Google UK local because of that, and be nothing to do with server location. Thanks Mhes for that suggestion!
George
