In an update to the previous post, Google’s Matt Cutts has finally answered commented on the question asked back in July:
“Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June?
You can see his video over at the Google Webmaster central video channel, but it may be difficult to spot as it actually answers a completely different question:
“Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs?”
This has caused a backlash by many in the SEO industry, so much so that Matt Cutts actually posted an article on his blog “More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results” , unfortunately it still doesn’t answer the question, or explain why Google UK results are so poor. It’s not confined just to UK search either though, other countries are seeing this invasion of poor irrelevant results.
In Matt’s post he invited visitors to comment of specific examples, and so far has seen about 140 comments placed, what is clear is that these poor search results are not just confined to small niches but mainstream results. How about some examples:
How about “family home kent“, there are only 2 UK results!, the first being the map, the other being at position 8!, all the others are from the US.
You can see it’s not just US results that are causing issues with this one “dining out“, the second result is from south africa, the 4th, 6th and 8th results are US (a bit far to go for a meal) while the 9th result is from Israel!
The search term “university admission” shows Stamford in position 3 (US), university of california in position 5, princeton at 6 and finland at 7 with the last place on the first page being a US news story. How far do you expect our students to go for an education Google!
I could go on but this is really starting to wind me up. Google sit up, pay attention and get the algorithm sorted please. Our British businesses are facing a hard enough time in this recession without having to compete with these irrelevant results!