Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
UK website ranking higher in Google.com than Google.co.uk
-
Hi, I have a UK website which was formerly ranked 1<sup>st</sup> in Google.co.uk and .com for my keyword phrase and has recently slipped to 6<sup>th</sup> in .co.uk but is higher in position 4 in Google.com.
I have conducted a little research and can’t say for certain but I wonder if it is possible that too many of my backlinks are US based and therefore Google thinks my website is also US based.
Checked Google WmT and we the geo-targeted to the UK. Our server is also UK based.
Does anyone have an opinion on this?
Thanks
-
Hi there,
Are you searching in Google.com from the UK, or are you actively making sure that you are seeing US-centric Google.com results? I ask because if you search in Google.com from the UK (without modifying your search to specify US results), you will receive UK-targeted results, even though you are not using Google.co.uk.
I also happen to be in the UK at the moment:
In order to see how Google.com ranks sites for a query in the US, you need to specify that you want US results. I use a Firefox / Chrome plug in to easily modify the URL for me: http://www.redflymarketing.com/internet-marketing-tools/google-global/
Thus, if I search for [credit cards] in Google.com, I can get this URL for US results: https://www.google.com/search?q=credit+cards&pws=0&gl=US.
If I just go to Google.com from here in the UK, these are the results I get: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1177&bih=539&q=credit+cards&gbv=2&oq=credit+cards&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=770l1989l0l2037l12l8l0l1l1l1l271l903l3.3.1l7l0
This search results page contains a few UK brands, because even though I'm on .com, Google knows I'm in the UK. It's not totally UK-centric, of course, since there are UK brands in there too. Depending on your query, you can get different degrees of relevancy.
Are you seeing true US results, or are you seeing UK-centric results on Google.com? If "&gl=US" in the query string of the Google search URL, like there is in my first example here, then you are still seeing UK-centric results.
It is not clear why Google shows different results in the UK for google.co.uk and google.com queries, but word is that soon, google.com results in the UK will be the same as google.co.uk.
If the site really is ranking a lot better in the US than in the UK, there is a different problem, but I thought this might be more likely.
Also, have you had a look at where most of your traffic comes from in Analytics?
Cheers,
Jane
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website ranking declined after connecting to CDN
Hi! We are trying to rank https://windowmart.ca for various local search terms. Our head office is in Edmonton where we try to rank https://windowmart.ca/edmonton-windows-doors/ for such terms as "windows Edmonton", "replacement windows Edmonton", "windows and doors Edmonton" as well as others. The website was the leader in its niche for around 2 years. Then we've got some server related issues, moved to a new server and connected CDN Nitropack that really improved our google speed test results. Recently we noticed that our rankings started to drop. Do you know if Nitropack can negatively effect local SEO rankings? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | vaskrupp0 -
Why can't google mobile friendly test access my website?
getting the following error when trying to use google mobile friendly tool: "page cannot be reached. This could be because the page is unavailable or blocked by robots.txt" I don't have anything blocked by robots.txt or robots tag. i also manage to render my pages on google search console's fetch and render....so what can be the reason that the tool can't access my website? Also...the mobile usability report on the search console works but reports very little, and the google speed test also doesnt work... Any ideas to what is the reason and how to fix this? LEARN MOREDetailsUser agentGooglebot smartphone
Technical SEO | | Nadav_W0 -
How do we keep Google from treating us as if we are a recipe site rather than a product website?
We sell food products that, of course, can be used in recipes. As a convenience to our customer we have made a large database of recipes available. We have far more recipes than products. My concern is that Google may start viewing us as a recipe website rather than a food product website. My initial thought was to subdomain the recipes (recipe.domain.com) but that seems silly given that you aren't really leaving our website and the layout of the website doesn't change with the subdomain. Currently our URL structure is... domain.com/products/product-name.html domain.com/recipes/recipe-name.html We do rank well for our products in general searches but I want to be sure that our recipe setup isn't detrimental.
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Google truncating or altering meta title - affect rankings?
I have a site that the title tag is too long and the title is simply the name of the site (I think they get it from ODP, not sure) Anyway, the rankings for the home page have dropped quite a bit. I'm wondering if the change that Google makes affects rankings (i.e. name of site doesn't have all the keywords).
Technical SEO | | santiago230 -
Blog Ranking NOT home page main website?!
Hi, Our Blog (http://blog.thailand-investigation.com) is ranking for some of our major keywords but not our home page (http://www.thailand-investigation.com)!? Our blog is WordPress and our main website is HTML. It seems like the search engines consider that they are 2 separate websites!? When I check the incoming links to our website, I get also the blog links!!!??? Is it normal? Do I have to build a relation of some kind or write some code saying that it is our Blog... I don't know! I'm not a SEO specialist or even a webmaster. I'm a small business owner and take care on my website. I created by myself but never learned! So, please help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | MichelMauquoi0 -
Google is Showing Website as "Untitled"
My freelance designer made some changes to my website and all of a sudden my homepage was showing the title I have in Dmoz. We thought maybe the NOODP tag was not correct, so we edited that a little and now the site is showing as "Untitled". The website is http://www.chemistrystore.com/. Of course he didn't save an old copy that we can revert to. That is a practice that will end. I have no idea why the title and description that we have set for the homepage is not showing in google when it previously was. Another weird thing that I noticed is that when I do ( site:chemistrystore.com ) in Google I get the https version of the site showing with the correct title and description. When I do ( site:www.chemistrystore.com ) in Google I don't have the hompage showing up from what I can tell, but there are 4,000+ pages to the site. My guess is that if it is showing up, it is showing up as "Untitled". My question is.... How can we get Google to start displaying the proper title and description again?
Technical SEO | | slangdon0 -
Why is my website banned?
IMy website is Costume Machine at www.costumemachine.com . My site has been banned for 1 year now. I have requested that google reconsider my site 3 times without luck. The site is dynamic and basically pulls in feeds from affiliate sites. We have added over 1,500 pages of original content. The site has been running great since 2008 without any penalties. I don't think I got hit with any linking penalty. I cleaned up all questionable links last November when the penalty hit. Am I being hit with a "thin" site penalty? If that is the issue what is the best way to fix the problem?
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
Has google panelized us ? If so, why ? How do I know if our website is panelized ?
We were ranked on first page among top 5 position a year ago for most of our pages. On one fine day, google decided to drop us from the results although google keeps indexing our pages. Google index our pages regularly but doesn't show them in its results. All google traffic we receive is for our own site name and its variations. I wanted to know - how do we know if google has panelized us. Why has google panelized us ? If they have panelized us, what can we do to get out of it ? Also I wanted to know if any tool will help me identify such thing. We have not done any link building. Our site page rank is 4 (it was 5 few months ago). All we did was on page optimization. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | seoidea0