"PAGES FROM THE UK." GREAT - BUT WHERE ARE THEY?

Paul Carpenter 1st January 2007
Paul Carpenter

If you use Google's UK site, chances are you've noticed a couple of radio buttons under the search box (if not - go have a look... it's free!) These are supposed to let you search the whole internet or limit your search to sites in the UK. Sounds useful? Well it's increasingly becoming a major source of concern to UK companies who are finding that the unreliable nature of this facility is costing them customers and money.

UK companies often choose to use the .com version of their domain name. On paper, this is short for 'company', so is fair game for any company to use. In addition, each country has its own specific extension. .us for the USA, .co.uk for the UK, .fr for France and so on. In practice the .com version is most widely associated with American firms but many companies are forced to purchase .com version for many reasons. In fact, most people - even in the UK - expect to find a .com rather than a .co.uk, which is sometimes seen as a poor relation.

So if you click the 'pages from the UK' option, how does Google decide what sites to show? Apparently, the answer is: "show a random selection of sites in a pretty much willy-nilly fashion".

As regular readers might know, one of our clients sells Polaris World properties. His site uses the .com extension. Until last week, it was motoring up the rankings for both 'pages from the UK' and worldwide. Then, today, apropos of nothing, it has been banished from the UK rankings. Expunged. Erased from history. Even for his company name - for which he has held the number one spot across all of the search engines for 2 years - he has slumped to page 4.

So what's his crime? Well - Google aren't saying. The best guess among the web marketing fraternity is that he fallen foul of a seemingly random bug in Google's algorithm that removes some .com domains from the rankings. Great.

Since at least October 2006, people have been reporting this problem to Google. As of today, January 2007, no fix is forthcoming. Stats indicate that something like 50% of all visitors use the 'pages from the UK' option. The commercial implications are stark and serious, yet have not been answered by Google.

What do we think?

The bug seems to be something to do with using the .com domain name. However, this is used by the huge majority of UK companies, and plenty of .com sites turn up at the top of the rankings for any UK specific search. Some have suggested that the problem might lie with where the site is physically hosted. In our client's case, the server is in Kent and the domain was registered through a UK company.

In short, there is something very very screwy in Google's workings. As of today, to people actually using Google to search, we would strongly advise against trusting the 'pages from the UK' results - as they cannot be considered to be accurate. Our complaint about this is filed with Google somewhere, and we'll keep you posted if we hear anything more.

Today's Moral

Google is seriously shortchanging UK companies - and - perhaps more importantly - UK searchers. With it's entire reputation being based on the perceived trustworthiness of its results, it's high time Google took notice of people who's businesses are being harmed by its technical shortcomings.

Notes and Queries...

Hi there,

Using .com can't be the full answer as I run a wedding and portrait business and own the .com and .co.uk versions of my websites (although I only promote the .co.uk)
If you search for "London wedding photographer"on Google (the web button selected) and then afterwards hit the "pages from the UK" button my result ( www.shotbythesheriff.co.uk ) comes up on page 2 and then page 1 - so far so good.
Do the same thing with the search term "wedding photographer" and it comes up position 44 (the web button selected) and 57 (pages from the uk selected).

This just doesn't make sense at all.

Any answers please let me know.

Thanks,

Keith Sheriff
Keith Sheriff 21st August 2007
Hi Keith,

The results from the different searches are rarely in kilter with each other. Google's algorithm is in a constant state of flux, and is distributed through different server blocks (called 'datacentres'). When you query Google, it is quite possible to see an entirely different set of results to a person sat on a computer next to you if they get connected to a different datacenter. On top of this, there are several different versions of the complete index of sites that Google has - some more up to date than others.

It's quite likely that the 'pages from the UK' uses a version of the algorithm quite different to that used for the 'worldwide' option. It will probably lag behind the main algorithm, and also use an older cache of sites. On top of that, it has the complex functionality of trying to work out which sites are from the UK (which as we've seen is far from perfect).

In essence, you're right: it doesn't make sense!

This is essentially because there is no such thing as the definitive Google rank. Over time, as they improve their technology you would expect your site to perform better on a UK search than in the main index, but until they've sorted out the technology nothing is certain!

Sorry I can't give you a better answer to your woes!
Paul Carpenter 21st August 2007
Well, I use a .net extension for my UK content site and I have it hosted in the US (cheaper and better support for the technologies required) - so I have no chance of appearing in the pages from the UK.
Dave Brown 2nd September 2007
Hi Paul,

Its all a big mess if you ask me. Other than paying for listings (Adsense etc) I can't see a way to consistantly achive good serch engine results placements (serps).
Money talks and I will always struggle to compete with people with bigger budgets who can aford professionals to do the search engine optomization for them.
My business literally flutuates with my serps.
Anyway bye for now,
Keith
Keith Sheriff 8th September 2007
Hi - we recently published some research on Google's 'pages from the uk' option. Essentially, we found that around one in 7 people searching google UK opt for the pages from the uk option.

More info here:

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/04/how_popular_is_googles_pages_from__the_uk_search_option.html

Thanks, Robin Goad
Research Director, Hitwise
Robin Goad 8th April 2008
Hi Robin - thanks for that! Seems the link is missing? I'll dig around and find the post though and add the link back in.

Cheers
Paul Carpenter 9th April 2008
The link is working perfect,
kamal bhakuni 21st October 2008
Hi Kamal - I can only swear, on my honour, that the link wasn't working when I wrote that (6 months ago!) Thanks for the update though :-)
Paul Carpenter 21st October 2008
and why do we always have to click the search uk only button when we're using the uk version of google? That's tiresome.
emma 5th November 2008
 
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