Search Result Discrepancy: Keyword "Dresses" shows international sites in the search results of Google.co.in.

[Myntra]

Hi All,

What would be the reason that Google shows international websites in the first page results while there are huge local players available. Eg: Dresses - Keyword that shows results with almost all the results from International websites whereas the local big players in the same category are not shown. This is not the case for other keywords like Women dresses, Clothing, Shoes etc., Is it a bug or any particular reasons?

Thanks,

[ConnectMedia]

Hi

Google will always give priority to International brands with high DA and PA even in local search results. A few years ago you would have seen local results dominating the top ten rankings but it seems for past few months or so Google has tweaked its algorithm to better rely on International brands such as <cite class="_Rm">www.newlook.com</cite> with a Domain Authority of 71 and Page Authority of 76! Especially when it comes to GENERAL search terms such as "Dresses".

Try to Google the term www.newlook.com, you will notice you will receive About 90,200,000 results, just to show you what you are up against! (Believe this is the site on top of search results)

This is a pretty powerful site and not easy to displace easily, as its an established "BRAND" with well over 32,664 Back-Links, a healthy link profile, superb original content, Well over 1 Million pages indexed, and thus from Google Perspective , it will have more trust to believe that this site is reputable enough to add more value in its search results, even those targeting Local Search Results.

Would advise to optimize for Keywords such as Indian Dresses, Dresses in India, Buy Indian Dresses, etc. As "Dresses" has a Keyword difficulty Score of 66% in Google.co.in. Which is Highly Competitive:

ONLY Powerful sites with strong pages tend to dominate these results. Links in quantity and quality (at both the domain and page level) are required to earn top rankings.

While a term such as "Buy Indian Dresses" has only a difficulty score of 45% , which as MOZ says is Moderately Competitive:

Search results in this category require high authority domains with well-targeted pages OR lower authority sites with powerful individual pages to achieve top results.

How Do Search Engines Determine Importance?

Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity – the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase users’ satisfaction by using metrics that interpret popularity.

Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually. Instead, the engines craft careful, mathematical equations – algorithms – to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then rank the wheat in order of tastiness (or however it is that farmers determine wheat’s value).

These algorithms are often comprised of hundreds of components. In the search marketing field, we often refer to them as “ranking factors” Moz crafted a resource specifically on this subject – Search Engine Ranking Factors.  -MOZ

[KeriMorgret]

A point of clarification here related to the first part of your answer. Google does not use PA and DA, those are Moz metrics. They're not looking at the Moz metrics for a site when they use their algorithms.