Why would google favour overseas retailers? Really weird results..

[predatornutrition]

Why would google favour results from overseas retailers for queries in the UK? It's weird since most won't ship to the UK and the same products are found at dozens of UK retailers. It's not the case that the overseas sites are necessarily bigger brands or better SEO optimised, so having asked the leading agencies in the UK and them being stumped I was curious if this was something anyone else had seen? Our theory is that this can only be a poorly disguised attempt to drive Adwords.

[RyanPurkey]

Hard to say. It looks like this has been more pronounced issue recently (https://www.venndigital.co.uk/blog/2015/01/is-google-killing-uk-businesses-organic-traffic/) and could be partly a glitch.  There have been several big shifts going on in this time frame though...

1. Ongoing EU legislation / voting to break up Google.
2. Firefox makes Yahoo the browser's default search engine.
3. Google incorporates Google Wallet into Gmail in the UK.
4. And per that article, Google.com starts appearing in search instead of Google.co.uk.

There's even more coverage of it here: http://www.thesempost.com/google-chrome-redirecting-uk-users-google-com-instead-google-co-uk/ but my guess is that these things are somewhat related. From that article, John Mueller from Google suggests you submit this form if it's affecting you: https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip. Personally I've seen the behavior in other browsers other than Chrome: Opera for example.

[predatornutrition]

Thanks for coming back to me and for a moment I thought that answered the question but checking various product terms on Google UK shows me the same results on four different devices and across Chrome, Safari and IE.

I noticed that the article referenced Office Desks producing US results but that term seems to be back to normal.

Given the above the mystery remains!

[RyanPurkey]

I don't think it's on a term by term basis. Either people are experiencing search directly from google.com or they're being redirected to google.co.uk and getting results there. If you look in the search preference section of your various browsers you'll likely see that it's set to google.com by default and is relying on the search engine to redirect you to google.co.uk based on your IP. if you change this to google.co.uk within the browser you won't get sent to google.com.

[predatornutrition]

Hi Ryan

I checked preferences and also ran the same search incognito. I have also asked people living 200 miles away to do the same and everyone is getting the same results. The only way Google displays relevant results is by going to advanced search and then requesting only pages from within the UK.

If you try that search yourself on google.co.uk do you get a bunch of overseas retailers including American especially on pages 2-3?

Just wondering if perhaps it is an issue only for searches performed from within the UK..

[RyanPurkey]

I see. Page 2 and 3 is pretty far down the chain. My guess is that Google knows how much people in the UK interact with the .com version of websites via social, email, price comparisons, research, and on and on, to the point that they include some results no matter what--unless, like you said, someone specifically says UK only. Is this a negative?  Maybe for some searches, but on average users are going to the .com as well by choice.

I guess that's an issue for a retailer that's solely UK based, but a non-issue for the percentages when you get into them at the level Google deals with.  ultimately they want to keep providing a service that people find valuable, so if it gets too far afield they'll go to Yahoo or Bing.

[predatornutrition]

Page 2 and 3 is particularly bad but even page 1 is bad. Some terms in the industry show US retailers on position 1 that don't even ship to the UK.

I really don't think people from the UK interact that much with some of the sites on page 1 - by contrast leaving aside Amazon and Ebay they would be unknowns here to 99% of people. I also don't think it is results from google.com since why would random foreign language retailers appear so high up (in fact if we assumed they were showing USA results, I would be asking why so few US retailers show compared to those from New Zealand and South Africa).

Having put this one to Rand I think the issue here isn't as easily solved as I hoped but you are right about their results. When they are this bad people will switch to Bing.