Google and Actinic?

[freakmode]

Hi

Looking at the SERPS last night I cam across something I am unable to explain.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...G=Search&meta=

If you look at the above search for body jewellery and pay attention to the sites in #3 #4 (us) and #5

Now if you select "Pages from the UK" and search again the results are quite different. #3 #4 and #5 are all gone. I though Google may be filtering by .co.uk and removing .com domains but the one near the top is still there and there are some on page 2.

Now #3 #4 and #5 sites all use Actinic Catalog.

Anyone explain what is going on here as I often look for products only from UK suppliers. Doing a whois shows us as having a UK IP so its not that.

Any ideas guys?

[Mike Hughes]

It's strange, but probably not due to Actinic. There's been a discussion about this happening on webmasterworld for the last month or so and the concensus seems to be that Google is a bit mixed up with the UK results.

The strange thing is that doing a site:www.jobananas.com search on google shows more pages indexed than doing the same search with the Uk qualifier. But looking at the pages it looks as if the search without the Uk qualifier has all the pages showing as supplemental.

I suspect Google is trying to make it's geographical results more relevant and is now taking into account other factors such as .co.uk domains, "UK" references, and probably other things such as city names, country names, etc.

Mike

[freakmode]

Its just strange that it seems to just remove the Actinic sites when UK specific but I just noticed that it only affects the index.html page.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...G=Search&meta=

This is a good example - index page removed but /acatalog/ page remains when UK only selected.

Annoying to say the least..

[Mike Hughes]

Yeah, that's what the people on webmasterworld have been complaining of. Sounds like a messed uip algorithm to me and I'm sure google will fix it in their own time.

If the Uk results are important to you then I would also consider putting more Uk stuff into your pages.

Mike