Of late, some UK Google users have been noticing that search results pages are showing more results from .com sites as compared to earlier. Apparently, users with .co.uk sites are used to get better ranking in Google, thus they assume that .co.uk sites are more relevant to their geographic location. Well, this is quite normal in some cases that the .co.uk sites are more relevant to UK searchers, however, this may not be the case always!
Google's Matt Cutts has posted a video in which he answers to a question from a user- “Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high on Google.co.uk since early June?”
“There’s a couple effects going on:
- first, we’ve been making changes that make it much more likely to see .coms in the UK. I’d say that’s 80-90% of the changes that people are seeing. Most of the generic TLDs (.com, .net, etc.) that are showing up now are .com sites like tescofinance.com and churchill.com that are relevant to the UK even though they don’t end in a .co.uk.
- I’ve been following some of the examples people have pointed out. I remember kiva.org in particular was mentioned and that probably is off-topic for the UK. I dug into that one, and it was an unrelated ranking experiment that was going on that we changed.”
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Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic is a trusted authority in the search engine marketing industry. He is a featured author at Web Pro News, Search Newz, Promotionworld, Website Notes, DevWebPro, SEO Article and Web Help Now among many others.
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