Greg Power (great name) pointed out this UK SERP  result for ‘travelodge waterloo’. Here the  the map shows Waterloo Canada not Waterloo London.

A quick look at the natural rankings the number two listing is travellodge in Canada, so the search ranking are wrong too.

This UK SERP problem was pointed out by LukeEales on twitter, the search for “long distance moving companies” is the worst he’s seen, and I’d have to agree.

So let’s break down the 1st page to check each site’s location.

I carried on going but there isn’t a UK based company in the top 7 pages.

What’s even more surprising is some of those sites appear in the from UK Results. There are UK websites that are relevant to the search query, a quick search with “long distance moving companies inurl:co.uk” shows a good selection.

Referring back to the post the early this morning about SharkSEO’s theory that Google is using related searches to generate some of the related searches for “long distance moving companies” does feature locations in the United States.

Are related searches influencing the results in the UK? Even if the search data is from the US?

After a little quiet period another problem with the UK SERPs was highlighted yesturday by  ismepete a SEO team leader for Verticle Leap. In performing some key phrase research in the nursing home industry Pete noticed that Google is way of the mark with some of their results.

In total all of the following key phrases returned some American sites on the 1st and 2nd pages.

• care services jobs
• elderly care providers
• nursing home help
• family nursing
• home senior care
• elderly services

Today another little problem in a competitive search result life insurance.  This time evilgreenmonkey – Rob Kerry felt like it was time to migrate to Bing due to the problem with New York Life ranking in Google UK for life insurance.

Now those who think that I’m just ganging up on Americans I’m not. I’ve nothing against any other them, there’s one down at my snooker club who’s a thoroughly nice chap. The problem is you can’t buy life insurance from New York Life if your based in the UK * (I think this is the case tried to find out but their FAQ isn’t great).

Jaamit Durrani tweeted later today that New York Life had since been removed from the UK SERPs. Another mystery solved, wonder if evilgreenmonkey will migrate back to Google?

Our first case study was found by Jaamit Durrani an SEO who works for Fresh Egg he noticed that for the search term [home furnishing] American based Pottery Barn had managed a ranking at number 1 . He tweeted Matt Cutts on Aug 28th to see if he had an answer.

That post was then retweeted a few times and then Jaamit noticed today that Pottery Barn had now gone from the rankings, Ikea is now ranking.

So it’s great that little issue is resolved but it looks like it took a manual edit to make the change and it’s not as if we can point out every problem in the UK SERPs to Matt Cutts….. can we?