A UK SEO

If you’re an avid reader of any UK SEO blogs you should have noticed posts about the recent shift with foreign (predominantly American) sites, outranking many UK sites on certain search terms. The problem has been seen under a wide selection of search phrases from many SEO companies / individuals in the UK. There have also been some indicated of the problem reserved with UK sites ranking well in Australia search results.

So what have we seen?

- 1st / 2nd page can seem unaffected with no movement at all.
- Around 10-30 sites rank from the 2nd / 3rd page thus pushing rankings 2 to 3 pages down.
- Domains are .com and hosting in foreign country or have a country specific TLD e.g. ww.domain.be

What should you do?

- Continue to add relevant unique content to your site be that news or a blog
- Continue to build links to the site, don’t increase this rate rapidly.
- Read SEO blogs to track the changes.
- Clean up any errors showing on Google Webmaster Tools, doesn’t have any effect just something to take your mind of the problem.
- Don’t panic and sit this problem out, Google should* reverse this problem.
* Nothing is guaranteed but with so much talk about this problem in the UK Google has to rectify this problem.

The issue seen by many UK SEO companies is that when Google makes a change such as the one seen you can’t really do much to rectify it. Clients will be annoyed about this stance but you can only sit it out and wait for the Search Engine to update, explain the issue to clients and keep them up to date. Most importantly you can’t really complain about Google, for all we know they could shut down tomorrow and there is nothing we can do about it!

An Idea

I do have one idea that could help thanks to Bing. Collective pressure from UK SEO companies on Google to either publically acknowledge the problem or get a fix in place. The only way this could succeed is by getting the issue in the public domain, on the BBC, ITV, Sky News etc. This then forces Google into doing something to prevent losing users to Bing, which is actually succeeding in being decent alternative to Google for UK public.

If you want to read up more on this or need proof to see that this isn’t an isolated case then here are 11 articles on the problem.

Google American Results Conspiracy – Fresh Egg

US websites ranking in Google.co.uk an example commercial laundry equipment – A UK SEO

Google uk mixing in us based queries – SEOptimise

Big Geo Problems Still Exist in Google UK Serps – PPC Blog

Google UK Serps Com On Down – North South Media

Have you noticed Googles shift from UK to US? – Argo IBC

The mystery of the UK SERPS – updated – Search Cow Boys

Will the Real Google Search Results Please Stand Up – SEO Design Solutions

Is Google’s Geo Targeting Off In Web Search? – Search Engine Round Table

UK Ranking Problems – UK Business Forums

Poor State of UK search today – Andrew Girdwood – Big Mouth Media

If you have any more, add them into a comment below and I’ll add them to the above list. Do you think collective pressure would get a responce from Google?

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There has been lots of chatter about a recent shift in ranking by Google with US based sites ranking in Google.co.uk, seoptimise and Search Round Table reported in articles and there was plenty of tweets about the movement. It’s caused a few problems with plenty of UK sites moving down the rankings due to the influx of US based sites.

It’s hard to quantify sometimes what has shifted in the rankings has done as you don’t have before and after data of the top 20, 30, 40 rankings.

Fortunately I have a report from January the 18th 2009 for the top 40 sites in google.co.uk on a search for “commercial laundry equipment”.

I’ve then taken the top 40 websites for the same search query today and the difference is concerning with US sites ranking in the place of many good UK sites. There is also sites from Belgium, India, Spain and China ranking in Google.co.uk.

The list is big so I have added it into a Google Docs Spreadsheet which can be seen by clicking the image.

It would be great to get someone from Google to have a look over this. If anyone has seen something similar with their clients or SERP’s post the details below in a comment. Also link to your own blog with an example of the movement of US sites in the UK rankings.

UPDATE 17/06 : Fresh Egg have an article on a similar problem with the key phrase Pet Surgery. Check out the article which has a great conspiracy theory behind the US sites ranking.

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Google Squared has launched this evening in the UK and after a little play there are a few ideas popping inside my head for quick ways to grab data for link baiting ideas.

For example if you have a football website you can write an article looking at football stadiums ordering by capacity, cost, pitch, size.

Having all this data on screen so quickly means you can start to write an article along the lines of “the 10 biggest… “the most expensive… etc. This is nothing new but it can speed up the process of gathering data for such articles.

Google Squared is still in it’s early stages and some of the data given isn’t correct, it would also be good to see the ability to export to csv / excel and also order the data by a certain field.

Head over to Google Squared and have a go.

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Slipping into TV and Print advertising in the last 6 months are requests to search online for … Asking the user to search online then means agencies can achieve almost direct conversions from TV ads. The first occurrence of such request was from mobile phone company Orange who asked people to search for “I am” so nothing too difficult for the SEO team to implement!

With no natural listings in sight they had to go with PPC paying for the traffic that followed instructions to search online for I am. The idea was good but the implementation was slated in the SEO community.

Similar to Orange computer animated film Monsters V Aliens asked people to search for MVA, with www.mvaconsultancy.com firmly holding down the number one organic spot PPC was used again to grab the traffic. I made a post with more details about MVA, the PPC campaign wasn’t well implemented and will have costed a small fortune. .

It seemed that most agencies were not getting the grasp of asking people to search online but then along come Tales of the Road from direct.gov, Think! and the Department of Transport.

The advert teaching kids about road safety asked the viewer to search online for “tales of the road”. Not to hard to remember and relatively easy to optimise for. The search result for “tales of the road” is is owned by the website with a PPC ad, number one ranking, site links, number two ranking and a video ranking.

Here a subdomain of direct.gov matches the search term. Using a sub domain then allows for site links (site links can appear for a inner page of a site but easier to gain on a sub domain) and a second listing for a inner page. Placing the video on YouTube a trusted domain then allows for the video to rank easily on the first page page.

One small point is that you can place a nofollowed html link in the description to a video on YouTube.

For any agencies implementing a “search for” campaigns then the Tales of the Road is an excellent blue print to use.

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It appears that Wolfman Alpha search results are appearing Google results. This search for “search for i am” returns a number 9 position for a Wolfman Alpha search result.

But the robots.txt is currently blocking search engines form the results page such as http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Where+am+I%3F
www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pirates+vs+ninjas
www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+meaning+of+life%3F

User-agent: *
Disallow: /input/

So either Google is ignoring the robots rule or Wolfman Alpha have only just blocked their results as their are 71 results for a site command on http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input/.

Still not found a really good use for Wolfman Alpha… still better than tonight’s Britain’s Got Talent

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I’ve noticed this afternoon that Google is now pulling requirements information in the top of the search engnine results page similar to pulling the next fixtures for football teams or the population of france. For example a search for wordpress requirements shows this.

It says “No Special Requirements” as it pulls the information from http://www.brothersoft.com/wordpress-175754.html. but as people will know Wordpress requires;

* PHP 4.3 or greater
* MySQL 4.0 or greater
* The mod_rewrite Apache module for SEO friendly URL’s

Come on Google get it sorted, the brothersoft website can hardly bee seen as trusted site with loads of adverts it says that WordPress that is shareware costing $19.95.

I’m guessing this is happening on plenty of searches so far i’ve seen it on:

phpbb requirements

Add any other examples in the comments below!

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It looks like Google Webmaster Tools is having a few issues at the moment with listing a 404 error on /index.html from external links pointing at that URL, but when you look at the external links they all point to the root of your site e.g. http://www.domain.com. I’ve seen such an instance this morning on a client’s site.

This has been noticed by Fizzarotti who posted on YouMoz.

The fix implemented by Fizzarotti decided to 301 /index.html back to the root. This can be done by rule in the htaccess file if your an an apache server.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]

This screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools shows the 404 error for /index.php with 100 links pointing to the page. (click to see larger image).

A second screenshot lists the pages where that link to /index.html. Check over them all point to the root of the site and not /index.html (click to see larger image).

In this example the rankings of the site haven’t been poor in recent weeks, Fizzarotti’s case on SEOmoz the site had dropped several rankings. I’m guessing there is another problem with Fizzarotti’s website and this ‘issue’ in Google Webmaster Tools is a reporting problem.

If you’ve seen the same problem add a comment below.

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Search Engine Rankings move, they move a lot and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it but keep on the track of building content and links which should reduce the movement.

How much can they move? Well in the matter of 12 hours my Blackpool FC blog move from 3 to 9 on the first page for the key phrase “blackpool fc“.

So happy happy, joy joy with a number three ranking, the official club site takes up number 1 and 2 spot so no room for improvement. That was about 11 last night.

This morning at 11, whammy all the way down to 9 on the bottom of the first page. I’m signed out of my Google account which can skew the results.

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There seems to be a little page rank update going on this weekend. As we know Page Rank doesn’t directly relate to how much traffic a site receives, sales or success but many people are hung up on what the little Green Bar says.

The last update was on News Year Eve, if you’ve gone down in Page Rank this time you’ve either lost links, links have changed to nofollow, or the sites that link to you have lost links thus not passing on the page rank they once did.

Another reason for a drop in score is Google shifting the boundaries, Google will shift the page rank boundaries up to make sure we all don’t end up with page ranks of 10.

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Following the release of Google Street View in the UK I’ve been roaming around Manchester the City I live in. At the moment street view hasn’t been released in South Manchester where I live but the city center down to Fallowfield is mapped and here my top drinking venues in the mapped area.

1. Jabez Clegg

2. Sinclairs

3. Trof Fallowfield

4. tv21s

5. The Old Monkey

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