Matt Cutts has released another video this time about .com websites ranking in different countries. Matt explains that Google looks at the location setting on webmaster tools when deciding which version of Google your site ranks in.

Most SEO’s know about this but maybe some of the Australian .com sites we have seen ranking in the UK have changed their location setting to the UK, which results in their sites ranking in the UK SERPs?

Watch the video, add any thoughts into the comments below.

Around half of the problems highlighted with the UK SERP’s are with duplicate locations. So you search for “flower shop didsbury” looking for a flower shop in Didsbury South Manchester, but Google thinks you are looking for a flower shop in Didsbury Alberta in the United states.

Original – http://twitpic.com/jp8lk

This was spotted by @_Chappers_ an SEO who works for Fluid Creativity in Manchester. Well done the Google maps team but the 1st result is a site listing flower shops in the US. But there have been plenty of other cases of this with the maps at the top of the SERPs being incorrect for locations like Manchester, Washington showing locations over the pond.

We know that there are a few lcoations in American that share their name with places in the UK but how many? If there’s hundreds of duplicate locations then Google may be making a lot of mistakes in the UK SERP’s?

Zooming in just above Baltimore, Maryland (been watching the wire recently) I took a screenshot and picked out all the places that share names with places in the UK in a Where’s Wally style.

Click To Enlarge

From that one section I counted 13 locations.

• Westminster
• Manchester
• Hampstead
• Dover
• Shrewsbury
• Cardiff
• Oxford
• Aberdeen
• North East
• Leeds
• Elsmere
• Newport
• Chester

and strangely

• Little Brittan

This is one tiny area of the United States which is rather large country. So they must be 1000’s of locations from the UK also sharing a name with a town or city in the US. Are we being a little too harsh on Google when they get one result wrong?