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?
5 Comments
Thanks for posting this and well done for setting this site up to highlight this issue.
It’s frankly ridiculous that it is still an issue.
What seems to have happened is that Google changed their algo back in June that messed up their geolocation filter for many queries. They deliberately kept silent on it despite SEOs demanding a fix, so as to not bring more attention to the problem. Then Matt Cutts finally had to say something and completely dodged the issue, as if the problem was .coms ranking rather than irrelevant non-UK sites ranking. However they seem to be manually cleaning up SERPs as and when they see examples of it happening. Many of the broken serps that have been highlighted since June have now been fixed. Yet matt cutts says there’s no problem. So it’s the old duality of what google says publicly and what they’re doing behind the scenes. And the underlying problem still seems to be in the algo, which no amount of manual fixing will resolve.
The lesson: if you see a broken result, tweet it to @mattcutts with the #ukserps hashtag!
Hi Jaamit
Cheers for the comment, do you think that they are working on a update now to sort the issue out once an for all? It’s not practical to fix each one manually.
John
you’d think they would, but then I thought they would do that as soon as it started happening so I’m not holding my breath…
all I can say is MS did a major fail by not rolling out the full version of Bing (ie all the features they give their US users) to the UK while all this was at its peak, they could have really stolen a march on the UK market share, too late now I think.
For sure, google still very much have the march over Bing. The future will be interesting though!
Ah its good that it was sorted, although am sure there are loads more problems out there that need to be fixed! To be fair credit to Matt Cutts for sorting it out so quickly