July 1, 2009

Google results messed up for UK SERPs

by Brian Turner

Google UK results remain in disarray after a major update at the beginning of the month saw results being flooded with non-UK websites.

Suggestions of changes being tested came up at the end of April and periodically through May, then from June 4th a major update went live across Google which brought a range of international sites to the fore of Google UK results.

Various rolling changes have since developed throughout June, but the search results still appear muddled and volatile.

Now it appears branding filters may be complicating an already bad situation, by ensuring big authority sites rank for irrelevant keywords, and major competitive keywords give prominence to websites which have little search-friendliness.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there are rumours that Google have been testing a new UI in Google Chrome that would remove the option to search results by UK only – excepting via a footer link once a search has been made.

The changes come at a time when Google is an undisputed monopoly in search for the UK, covering at least 80% of the user market. Yet Google remains under pressure after Microsoft revamped their Live search as Bing.com.

Fortunately for Google, Bing.com seems to have been treated as a general novelty – and in terms of results, they appear far too similar to previous Live offerings in terms of being over-sensitive to keyword URLs and link volume.

However, the current changes to the Google UK ranking algorithm come after a string of user-focused changes to the search engine that make it less friendly to use.

Google won out in the early days because of its simplicity – a plain uncluttered page to search from was a great home page to start with, when all around were trying to be portals.

Last year’s launch of iGoogle tried to portalise Google through personalisation, and then this year saw changes with search suggestion as a default feature, and an attempt to push Local Search into major traffic keywords.

Local Search so far appears like a dismal failure – the UK is so small and densely populated that user IP’s depend more on datacentre locations than actual user locations – making Google’s attempts at geolocating by city in the UK laughable. Users are presumed to be in completely unrelated locations, and various Local Results appear irrelevant or simply map spam.

Now it seems that Google may be looking to drop a UK-focus on Google UK results and push on these troubled Local Search results instead – if claims about the new UI tested in Google Chrome are true.

If they are, then it would suggest that Google has completely lost touch with itself, by not focusing on preserving the useful user experience, but instead on trying to completely change how that user experience is served in a way that does not benefit users – certainly not those in the UK.

In the meantime, there has been no word from Google as to what degree these changes have been intentional, or whether users and businesses have to suffer sitting through yet another volatile Google update as their techies attempt to figure out what may have gone wrong.

UPDATE: It is now being reported that UK cities are being listed with references for equivalent US cities instead of UK data.

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Story link: Google results messed up for UK SERPs

 

Tags: Google

Posted in: Internet