Google GeoTargeting way off
on last nights Strikepoint radioshow I mentioned How Google’s Geotargeting was way off the mark, I showed an example
for Car Sales I think that was the term, anyway it will do ..
I have a screen shot for google car sales serps on Flickr
Ok so let’s pull this apart .. I’m in the UK, my IP address is UK, and it gets better, look closely I’m logged into Google and they Know I’m in the UK.. so wtf why do I get 4 out of the TOP 5 searches are Australian ..
http://www.carsales.com.au/ = 202.58.56.16 Country Australia
http://www.carsales.com.au/ = 202.58.56.16 Country Australia < yer they got in twice lol
http://www.autotrader.co.uk/ = they are clever about their IP, one in the US and one in UK
http://yahoo.drive.com.au/ = 203.26.51.163 Country Australia
http://www.automarket.com.au/ = 203.202.10.9 Country Australia
so what do you think Good – Bad or EVIL?
DaveN
Alister Cameron, Blog Consultant 2324 days ago
http://www.alistercameron.comI have it all figured out, mate.
Google’s algorithm is freakishly amazing, and the latest thing is they’re doing is pairing the quality of their service to UK people with the quality of English cricket.
Now I’m blogging and watching the 20/20 that’s on in Sydney at the same time, and I’m afraid your lot will be out faster than I can type this thing!
My theory is that if the Brits can start winning a cricket game – anywhere – there’ll be an immediate improvement at Google.
Then again I could just be tired after a long day, giggly about the cricket demolition of England, and as usual, full of sh*t.
Cheers, mate.
- Alister
Stefan Juhl 2324 days ago
http://stefanjuhl.com/Maybe because they know you so well that they assume you’re an Australian surfer.. Why else would you be so obsessed about VW campers…
If I do the search ‘car sales’ from here (Denmark) I see pretty much the same results, but if I add the geolocation parameter for UK I get mainly .co.uk results: http://www.google.com/search?q=car+sales&gl=uk
Jixi 2324 days ago
Could it be that they think “car sales” is a Aussie term and therefore they expect Aussie results?
Or it could just be a bug. Or Google are EVIL (which they obviously are).
Helen 2324 days ago
http://www.nonlinear.ca/blog/I’ve noticed that when searching Google with a Canadian IP address, there are a lot of Canadian addresses (as expected), then a lot of .co.uk sites come up, and finally, Australian addresses. Frequently Google seems to list .co.uk sites when Canadian sites are not available.
Dave Naffziger 2324 days ago
http://www.naffziger.net/blog/I found it interesting that most of the ads listed in your screenshot are for .co.uk…
Michael Goc 2324 days ago
http://www.mykel.plSo lets put on our tin foil hats for a moment…the PPC ads must sure be getting more clicks with the regular results so off
If I were paying for PPC on those pages, I’d be happy to have such nice ctr’s.
Jenstar 2324 days ago
http://www.JenSense.comI see the same results as Dave from here in Canada.
Joost de Valk 2323 days ago
http://www.joostdevalk.nl/blog/Exact same results from the Netherlands as well
rodsta 2323 days ago
Alister is right, you need to work on your cricket team mate! Or maybe try sending the Barmy Army to Mountain View! Used and New cars is a huge market (and profitable) in Aus dominated by Fairfax and Packer and when you look at the media properties of those two players it’s pretty easy for them to create an ‘authority domain’ that could possibly out weigh any regionalisation of results, much like wikipedia does. Can you select UK results only – On the AU google we can select to show results from Au only, which will show only results with .com.au or hosted in AU.
rodsta 2323 days ago
maybe there is something screwy going on see http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/09/view-where-your-ad-is-showing-around.html
the manual locatation and attributes page has dissapeared?
Paul Carpenter 2323 days ago
http://www.clearsitemarketing.co.ukI’m having enormous problems with Google’s screwy “stick a finger in the air” approach to determining where a site is located. They’ve removed one of my sites from the UK rankings altogether – despite it sitting nicely near the top for months, being hosted and registered in the UK, in a UK specific market with good proper UK spelling and *everything*. It even says UK in the domain name.
Not that that’s relevant entirely – but Google are really going to have to get their heads into gear over this one. You or I with 2 minutes and some basic tools can tell where a site and a computer is hosted and make a better decision about what sites to show someone. I’m not sure Google really cares though: they’re still selling the AdWords…
Dudibob 2323 days ago
http://www.dudibob.comGoogle do have a pretty accurate Geo system, however you need to change domains to get to the right one, .com results from my experience just show the ‘best results in the world’
digitalmarketer 2323 days ago
http://booststrapping.typepad.comAdvertiser or Google ??
In the US, I have seen several examples of companies ads appearing for the wrong markets. More often than not we find that the company did not set their geo targeting settings properly within adwords. We service companies targeting metropolitan areas and smaller local targets and find that the Geo targeting system works rather well.
Gavin 2322 days ago
http://www.irelandseomarketing.comBad? Thats an understatement, more like pure cow dung.
Oh by the way I get the same results here in Dublin and Dudibob you must be on crack cause my results are showing the same on google.com.
The only time I seen ‘best results in the world’ was when Ireland beat England at the footie…..oh Dave what a dig, lol.
rodsta 2322 days ago
Australia won the ashes so it’s only fair that .com.au recieves more auth weighting!!!! which auth recieves more weighting than geo on g.com, use the regional engine for regional results – g.co.uk. It makes sense to me.
Nicholas 2322 days ago
You are wondering why carsales.com.au ranks number 1 for the search you did?
carsales.com.au is 50% owned by a company called Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL).
MSN in Australia is called “ninemsn”. The ninemsn website says “Formed in 1997, ninemsn is a 50:50 joint venture between the Microsoft Corporation and Australia’s leading media company, Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL).”
Try another search for say…”Health Insurance”
Who is number one in the ‘natural’ results? http://www.iselect.com.au
This website is operated by a private company called iselect Pty Ltd and guess who owns 36.64% of this company….Ninemsn Pty Ltd.
I know a little bit about SEO and I can’t see any reason why a site like the iselect site would rank well in the absence of a hand job.
There are dozens of similar examples. We have known for the last couple of years that the ninemsn ‘natural’ search results always favour sites that they have a relationship with. What amazes us is that Microsoft have seemingly allowed the hand manipulation corrupt their UK results as well. Maybe the local cowboys here in Australia will be told to pull their heads in!
Nicholas 2322 days ago
BTW am refering to the search you made during the podcast on Live Search!
Goo Theory 2314 days ago
http://www.gootheory.com/The problem could lie with the amount of trust the big G puts in .com.au domain names. It’s piss easy to make .com.au domain names rank because right off the mark they have a high trust factor (similar to domain names that have been around for a long time).
This trust factor comes from the fact that to register a .com.au domain there are a few requirements that make the barrier to entry fractionally higher than the average joe is used to for a .com (generally speaking, your .com.au domain has to be related to a product/service of your business or your actual trading name).
In theory Google should just filter out any extensions from other countries (.com.au, .co.nz .tw etc)… but by doing this they risk losing relevant results that could well be based in the UK, but just using a different extension for some other reason other than geography (just imagine if they filtered out all .tv’s unless you were searching from Tuvalu.. that would hurt a lot of people worldwide)..
GerBot 2241 days ago
http://www.gerarddoyle.comlooks to me like this is happening again.
Given that this is so easy to detect I wonder what crazy stuff Google are working on that has caused this.
Page geo-targeting based on inbound IPs????
I don’t remember anyone ever saying this was broken
Jez Toll 1592 days ago
http://www.purenet.co.ukVery Bad and confusing…I’ve just done the search again and UK results are coming up. So, me thinks they’ve fixed it.