Conspiracy Theories – Google
A common conversation we keep hearing around the office, both from clients, other businesses we come into contact with and from our personal observations is that the US listings in the Google SERPS seem to be coming up a lot for Google.co.uk searches. This got us thinking about whether there is potentially some foul play on the part of Google.
Consider this: If you are a US company, who provides traffic to websites, would you favour US websites over local websites in foreign SERPS in order to help bolster your failing economy?
Lets take a look at a search term, purely at random I’m going to choose the term “dave” – mainly cos my name is Dave and Dave Naylor’s name is also Dave, and there probably hundreds of thousands of Dave’s in the UK getting worked up about this (well maybe not). So I type in Dave and I get the following:
Inspecting each result, we can see the following:
- dave.uktv.co.uk – UK, but running Google AdSense
- dave.uktv.co.uk/shows/sitcom/red-dwarf/ (let’s here it for Dave Lister) – again, UK but running Google AdSense
- www.imdb.com/title/tt0106673/ – US website
- www.scripting.com – Dave Winer – US
- www.dave.biz – UK, but a brand consultancy who no doubt spend a lot of money with Google
- www.mezzoblue.com – in Canada, at least it’s not the US, but its still not the UK
- www.davewarnke.com – San Franscisco – US
- dave.org.uk – wahey! A guy called Dave from the UK! Finally!
- www.davegahan.com – some artist from the US (damn back to US listings)
- Thursby Software – a company in Texas, again the US – they do some file and print sharing called “Dave v7.1.2″
So a quick summary, out of 10 listings on Google.co.uk for the search term “dave”, only 4 were actually UK web pages, and out of these 4, I believe only one of them didn’t support Google through AdWords or AdSense.
Another problem is that in the UK Google AdWords revenue gets sent to Ireland – so they don’t pay tax to the United Kingdom, with the huge amounts of revenue on Google AdWords, this is a large amount of tax that the UK is missing out on!
Update: apologies Dave Gahan is apparently British.
DazzlinDonna 1355 days ago
http://www.dazzlindonna.comWell, if you’re going to be able to defend your tinfoil hat properly, what you need to be able to show is that BEFORE the big recession crisis hit, that same search showed more UK sites in the SERPs. It still wouldn’t prove the conspiracy theory, but it would at least have some direct correlation to the timing of a company looking to bolster its country’s failing economy.
David Whitehouse 1355 days ago
or perhaps Google have just been supporting the US all along, despite the recession, and it has always been a bit biased…
DaveN 1355 days ago
actually Donna I might have that but from memory I used to rank and “Dave Gorman” a uk comedian and Dave Stone ( uk again ) and Dave tv had two domains ranking lol ..
And I don’t think for 1 second that google would do this, the UK serps are just poor at the moment @:)
DazzlinDonna 1355 days ago
http://www.dazzlindonna.comRight, Dave, I didn’t really think the post was serious, and my comment wasn’t meant to be taken really seriously either. Heck, I enjoy wearing tinfoil myself now and then; I consider it to be a fashion-forward accessory.
It would, however, be interesting to be able to compare previous UK results with current UK results to see if anything pops out as being a good reason for the changes. Obviously, Google and MC believe the changes are based on some sort of sound reasoning, but it would be fun to try and determine what that might be.
Or…we can just enjoy the tinfoil reasons just as much.
Andre 1355 days ago
Easy fix Dave and … Dave, throw some Google Adsense up on the page and bam you too will rank for the term Dave.
Paul 1355 days ago
http://www.northsouthmedia.co.uk/Erm, but you got Adsense running on here Dave haven’t you? Fresh Egg came up with a similar conspiracy theory as well, it seems to be growing in popularity …perhaps all us Brits just need to go buy a .com suffix and register a US P.O box as our address and we are good to go … if only it were that simple
Becky 1355 days ago
http://www.beckynaylor.co.uk@paul, that was another theory we had …. we always suggest to clients that to get good UK rankings that it helps having a co.uk and especially to be hosted in the UK .. but perhaps now we should be looking at getting the .coms as the main domain with good solid USA hosting to get good UK rankings in the UK?
DennisG 1355 days ago
http://thenextcorner.netI see the same thing in The Netherlands.
Searching for San Francisco, I only see two Dutch websites, one of which is Wikipedia.
I used to rank on the first page, but fallen to page 3 somewhere in June.
If you filter on Dutch sites, I’m back on the #2 spot, just after Wikipedia…
Still not sure what is happening here, but it sure isn’t as relevant for Dutch searchers.
Amelia Vargo 1355 days ago
It seems a shame that there are so many US results coming in the .co.uk results. Could this spell the end for Google’s monopoly on search in the UK? I think if this is a policy of Google’s they should think long and hard about it because ordinary people (ie non-techy folk) will stop using them if the search results aren’t good enough for them. Or perhaps this is intended to get us all to start switching to ‘pages from the UK’?
Mon 1355 days ago
http://www.thekettletheory.comI most certainly do believe google would do this. The UK search results are scrambled at the moment. And, from what I have seen, the more money you spend with Google, the higher your natural results.
Dave Ashworth 1355 days ago
http://www.webmarketingadvisor.comJust being pedantic but I have to point out Dave Gahan is/was the lead singer of Depeche Mode and is very much English
BluelightSEO 1355 days ago
http://www.bluelightseo.co.ukIs Dave a good term to be using though? a US result could be relevant here, for example if you were searching for an actor or something?
I find that it is most frustrating when searching for a product, for exampkle “LG laptop battery” there are US, Australian and even Korean results there. I don’t really want to pay for that shipping, especuially from Aus!
Sam 1355 days ago
http://www.ip-seo.comWhat’s on ITV tonight at 9pm everyone? Check out this TV guide (from Yahoo.com) – 3rd result down.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=tv%2Bguide&start=0&sa=N
It’s almost as bad a Dutch “motor forums”.
I don’t disagree with conspiracy theories (and won’t until Matt Cutts comes back and comments).
But this result for Yahoo.com in Google may throw water on the adsence theory – and instead just show that Google is not as clever as we all think.
Elaine 1355 days ago
http://www.allkids.co.ukdon’t want to be controversial but I always use ‘pages from the UK’ – sorted
Paul 1355 days ago
http://www.northsouthmedia.co.uk/Elaine, I hear ya, but wouldn’t / couldn’t Google be better serving UK searchers results that are relative and having ‘the web’ radiobutton as an alternative instead of the way it currently is designed.
Most of us know that Google is always tweaking with its search page, making minor adjustments for better usability and profitability – perhaps even allow users the choice of their preferred setting without having to sign into Google.
Lior 1355 days ago
http://anecdotot.netNitpicking – Even though Dave Gahan’s site is US, he’s actually British (Gahan is the lead singer for Depeche Mode).
Allan Stewart 1355 days ago
http://www.fireflyseo.comI have always been of the opinion that you should have a .com and host it in the UK with a UK address on your WHOis record. Reasons why…
1) .com can be registered for 10 years which is better than .co.uk (this was the case last time I checked)
2) People still use .com a lot becuase they automatically assume Google.com (yes I know it redirects to your country TLD. But how long till Google.US comes into play and Google.Com becomes used for what it should be i.e. global.
3) UK IP and UK WHOis record is enough to rank in for the UK SERPS, I am 99% sure it done on IP and Whois. NOT Tld. Look at SERPS in google.co.uk for “home insurenace” 9/10 are .com
Anyway, I have always beleived this to be the best practice hence why I have .com 10 years registered hosted on a unique (NON SPAMMY) IP address in the UK.
On another note, I used to beleive that having your own UK nameservers was important too. Not so sure on that one now to be honest. I set up BIND on 2 seperate Debian Vservers, ran 1 site for 1 year on wolverine.fireflyseo.com and xavier.fireflyseo.com. To be honest, it made NO difference over running on 123 reg or UK REG nameservers. These were UK thought!! Summary of this point is don’t waste time on nameservers.
Hope this helps some of you.
Steve 1355 days ago
Here’s the proof that more .com’s are appearing in Google.co.uk results -
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-about-generic-tlds-in-say-uk-results/
Shark SEO 1351 days ago
http://sharkseo.comI think Google is trying to display UK results for buying queries (like “buy playstation”) but make informational queries (like “playstation specs”) more international, because you don’t necessarily need to have UK results if you’re just trying to find something out. There’s more on it here http://sharkseo.com/google/google-makes-me-a-sad-panda/ but in short, they’re making a right mess of it.
Less controversial than your theory though
Google UK SERPS- How Relevant Are They? | SEO Services UK, Optimisation Services | Bluelight SEO 1349 days ago
[...] Dave Naylor had looked at the possibility of this being a conspiracy to promote US sites, however I think it’s purely a problem with the algorithm, especially as it’s not all US sites appearing. [...]
hotelgirl 1345 days ago
http://www.ho-tel.co.ukGoogle is totally in the control of the governments who are sing it to suppress and isolate free thinkers.
check out my awesome game http://www.ho-tel.co.uk that they dont want you to find. I can see stuff from the logs that prooves in my minds eye that they are manipulating the search engine positions, for example, a hit comes in and within a minute I check the reffering address, and theres nothing there. Google has the technology to limit ads through Adwords, it can do it, and i think its applying the same principles to regular search. Combine this with multiple data centers i think people are being directed through certain datacenters based on their location and risk level. So if your a radical free thinker, you go through a data center geared up to show or not show certain sites etc etc. Plus mirroring the web.
Regualr people just go through the regular Google index that is not modified.
I also think they have a army of forum hackes and robots that go around pretending to be people.
aimClear’s 2009 Daily Training Link Library » aimClear Search Marketing Blog 1234 days ago
[...] Conspiracy Theories – Google, David Naylor 9/2 [...]