Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Google UK results have been completely scrambled by a major update at the beginning of the month. The results are being utterly overtaken by non-UK websites.

On June 4th, a major update went live across Google. The result? A host of international sites springing to the top of Google UK results.

Rolling changes have developed throughout June as Google apparently is scrambling to tweak their algorithm in regard to geographic results, but the search results still are bouncing madly and are highly unreliable and off base.

Apparently branding filters have complicated an already impossible situation, ensuring that  big authority sites acheive rank for irrelevant keywords. Major competitive keywords are now giving favor to websites which what should be inadequate search-friendliness.

In addition, the rumour keeps circulating that Google is testing a new UI in Google Chrome. This would eliminate even the option that to search results by UK only -your only hope would be to use a footer link once a search has been made, adding yet another step.

Google has an undisputed monopoly in search for the UK, covering at least 80% of the user market. This could change in a short time span, however, as Microsoft just relaunched their Live search as Bing.com.

So far, Bing.com is being treated more as a short term novelty than as a serious search option – theier results appear too similar to previous Live offerings, seeming to be ovely sensitive to keyword URLs and link volume.

These current changes to the Google UK ranking algorithm, however, are another hindrance to Google users, as there has been an unending panorama of user-focused changes to the search engine this year, making it less friendly to use.

This year in particular saw an attempt to push Local Search into major traffic keywords – which is turning out to be a dismal failure, at least in the UK. Britain is so small and densely populated that user IP’s depend more on datacentre locations than actual user locations. Google’s attempts to geolocate by city in the UK just aren’t working. Various Local Results appear based in incorrect assumptions about user location, and are useless.

Now, to make things worse, reports are in that UK cities are being listed with references for equivalent US cities instead of UK data. Google needs to fix UK results before Britain’s users defect to Bing or Yahoo.