Just this morning my site was at #4 here in the UK for a very competitive keyword - one of four .com's of the first ten results. Tonight all four .com's have been removed and replaced with less relevant .co.uk's. Is this a new attempt by Google to literally geotarget results? Before anyone suggests that it's just a reindex ... the .com SERPs are unchanged.
google has been doing this for a while, I appear first for some key words when I search here in the UK but when I get friends to go the same in America im forth
My SERPs are unchanged on the .com - #5. It appears that Google has lost the index pages of the .com sites from the UK SERPs. Several .com results are found on page 3, 4, 5, etc - but never the home page. Only www.widget.com/widget.html for example ...
Thanks for that insight JackR. I wasn't aware of this and found for our companys most important keyword we're #8 on .com but below #50 on the .co.uk (stopped searching after #50) I found something strange though which is there was barely any .coms in the uk search but #1 was a .com I did a little bit of investigating and found on the #1 .com they had 'UK' in their address on their contact page, 'UK' also appeared quite heavily throughout the contacts page, where as on our company site UK isn't mentioned. I'm a total newbie to all this SEO so take this with a pinch of salt: Would it be the case that on the .co.uk searches the algorithm will look for the contacts page and look specificly for 'UK' or something similar and then if you have a (not sure of the term but) top level domain like a .com it will place you higher than the .co.uk's It would be interesting to get a SEO pro's perspective on this, I'm going to make a couple of adjustments relevant to the above and see what happens to our site, hope this has helped JackR.
This issue has been much debated on another board and there seems to be a consensus that Google is testing some sort of filter to try and produce more accurate local results. The problem of the missing homepage/index page has been well documented and is an issue that Google is aware of. I first read about this problem some months ago, but as four/five of the top ten for my main kyword were .com's, didn't think it would affect my site. The irony is that just this week I moved to UK hosting precisely to ensure a 'pages from the UK' presence. Within 24 hours of having done so, my homepage had indeed been indexed and placed at #4. 24 hours later it had gone - along with the homepages of the other .com's in the UK SERPs. What is Google playing at? kungfukenny, I'd be grateful if you could PM me the URL of the site you mention...
I'd laugh if your host put you on an American server :S It would be strange for Google to disadvantage .com sites, as the most popular domain is the .com and many UK based sites use .com. Perhaps Google's SERPs are acting up with your site just moveing hosts? Or, maybe, you should get a .co.uk domain to redirect to the .com
My hosting is in the UK - my dedicated server is physically located in the UK. Second, having your site hosted in the US would not explain why only the index page is absent from the SERPs ...