Added : Ok I know why we get AU results it’s because more people search for “Compare ADSL PLANS” over “Compare ADSL packages” au v uk term, what pisses me off is google is changing our searching patterns :
What seemed like a very simple and I mean a very simple conversation ended up taking 1 hour of my life away, in a preamble to this story you need to know a few things. Ant is an inhouse SEO that just bought his first house in Ripon, Bronco is the company I own and we give all staff if they want it free broadband, So ….
Ant : Dave who should I use for my Adsl
Me : I dunno see whats available at the moment
Ant : Haha they’re all from Australia
Me : Huh?
Ant : ( via IM ) http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=compare+adsl+plans&start=10&sa=N&num=20
Me : you know what the F…. ( 1 hour later ) btw try Broadband Finder that’s who I used when I switched to Plusnet
Screen Shot : click it and it will get bigger 
Dave
11 Comments
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If you head over to http://www.google.co.uk/insights/search/#q=compare%20adsl%20plans&cmpt=q
you’ll see that the majority of searches are from down under. I’m guessing that down under they call broadband “ADSL” where not many people in the UK call it ADSL.
Google is just serving the results it thinks is relevent, but can’t see it been relvent if they are looking at trend data from the other side of the world.
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@aukseo yep did post a while ago on this http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/this-doesnt-make-sense-ukserps.html
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Yahoo fare better, suggestion wise:
UK: http://uk.search.yahoo.com/?p=compare+adsl
AU: http://au.search.yahoo.com/?p=compare+adsl(hit space)
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Just looking at a related search “compare broadband plans” so a UK version of the search above. The current top ten on Google UK has 3 .com.au domaind and one .in domain.
So even if you search with a “UK Term” it’s still not giving the correct results.
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Not true that they’re all from Aus, I saw one result from NZ and one from South Africa
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Interesting observation regarding AU results. Rob Green had a similar perspective on his recent blog post, although he argues that the UK SERPs fine!
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Is Bing copying Google data as there are results are full of .Au domains too. Hmmm Interesting ….
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Why don’t you just select the ‘pages from the UK’ option??
That seems to work fine for me, with most results relevant – except the current number 1 spot, which happens to be this post!!Therefore I happen to agree with Rob Green’s post that UK SERP is generlly fine.
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[...] as Dave Naylor pointed out recently, Google is influencing our search terms via [...]
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[...] Dave Naylor [...]
As you pointed out to me yesterday Dave, I think the bigger problem (who calls them “plans” over here anyway?) is that Google is only too happy to suggest the query “compare adsl plans” as you start typing.
Maybe the country weighting of Google Suggest needs to be turned up a bit.