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I operate several travel-related sites. Most of my pages ranked very well until the last update ... then disaster hit. Pages that had routinely ranked very well month after month suddenly fell off the map. The pages are still in Google's index and their PR has not decreased ... but they now rank so low that I literally gave up trying to find just how deep they're buried.
I noticed that the pages still rank well on a number of international versions of Google ... for example, google.de and google.it
Why is this? Does Google not use the same algo on all versions of its sites? Or is this just the way things ocurred this past update?
I'm hoping maybe Google decided not to apply the recent algo change across the board because they know it's somewhat lacking. :)
Welcome to the public side of WebmasterWorld! [webmasterworld.com]
Did you try international versions of google right in the adress bar for your keywords?
Try a generic search like this :
www.google.ca/search?q=Your query
www.google.fr/search?q=Your query
www.google.it/search?q=Your query
www.google.de/search?q=Your query
Are some of your sites hosted in different countries eg: (German site in Germany or with .de extension)?
Last update has been very strange for many, a lot whom are better qualified than me to possibly shed some light on the topic.
Shak
Shakil:
None of our sites are hosted in other countries. All are hosted in the US.
Heini:
Appreciate the link to the thread. That helped but I have to admit I'm still very confused. I just don't understand why Google would choose to apply different filters or algos to sites simply because they are "travel related" or because they are hosted in different locations.
A site hosted in the UK or Germany could still be targeting a US audience and vice versa. For example, it seems to me a good site based on let's say "The History of Elvis" should rank well period ... it shouldn't matter what country the host happens to be located in.
As for a different algo being used on different Google sites, it seems to me either an algo is good and should be applied everywhere or it shouldn't be applied at all. Why use a different algo for the US-based Google than what's used for say Google Germany?
I can perhaps see the need for different filters and algos being applied to sites that use non-English languages or for domain extensions that are obviously from different countries (.ca, .de, .it etc.) ... but English is the "universal language" and .com is kind of the universal domain extension. I don't see how they can successfully filter these type sites.
I'm sure there are logical reasons behind all of this. Guess it's all just a little over my head.
Geo targeted results make a lot of sense from different perspectives.
The obvious one would be business reasoning. Google's PPC offers are already geo targeted. Applying this also to the regular results could create a perfect environment for selling ads.
The second would be user satisfaction. Now this is abit dicey. While in some areas localised serps clearly would be advantagous, like yellow page type searches, in many many other areas this would lead to a great loss of search quality.
A third reasoning would be to be able to circumvent political/cultural pitfalls.
Anyhow, all of those aspects would make applying different filters/algos only to certain search areas a quite logical step to take.
