There's been quite a lot of talk recently about some weird things going on in the Google.co.uk search results. If you're watching the UK SERPs closely you should have noticed some unusual fluctuations in the search rankings with lots of US websites showing up were only .co.uk's used to sit. This has become a trendy topic with webmasters brainstorming the issue trying to find a clue as to what's going on.

Finally Matt Cutts cleared things up explaining the reason behind the changes on the organic landscape of Google UK. Turns out Google are now letting .com domains into the UK search results. We all kinda got used to .co.uk sites having a huge preference in the UK SERPs but it looks like the days of the British TLD dominance are over.

The reason behind this change is that there are a lot of websites that are relevant for the UK searchers even though their URLS don't end in .uk. There are companies catering to the UK market via .com websites, anyone can blog about some events in England and their blog posts will be relevant for the UK whatever their TLD is. So obviously this is a big step forward for Google which is likely to benefit both the searcher and the businesses targeting the UK market. This is how it works in theory. Now let's see how Google manages to put this update into life.

Care for some pizza?

I've heard a lot of UK webmasters complaining about irrelevant results on Google.co.uk. But let's be honest, we SEOs often tend to think that results are irrelevant only because our own websites are not listed in top 10. So I decided to check this out. I went to Google.co.uk and made 3 queries using the 'Pages from UK option'. The keywords I used were 'health insurance', 'car hire' and 'pizza delivery' all without quotes.

The SERPs came up with 30% of .com websites listed on the first page, which is quite a lot given that the keywords are very geo-specific (you wouldn't order a pizza from New York if you lived in Manchester would you?). Here's how the .com websites rank for the keywords:

As you can see .com websites rank in the top 10 for highly competitive keywords. Now let's see how relevant these sites are to a British searcher. Out of the 9 .coms listed for the queries all sites had information on health insurance in the UK, offered a car for rent in major UK cities or listed restaurants and pizza takeaways with order forms.

So after searching on Google.co.uk you can get your health insured and drive home on a rented car eating a pizza all ordered via a .com site. 100% relevance. Great job Google. It seems that the allegations of lots of irrelevant results in the UK SERPs are not quite true, though I don't have enough data to jump to conclusions.

How to rank well in Google.co.uk with a .com website

Now let's see how Google tells if a .com website is relevant to a .co.uk query and how these websites manage to rank so well in the UK SERPs. Here's what I came up with after a quick SEO analysis of the .com sites:

On-Page Factors:

All sites have geo-modifiers such as UK, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds in titles, H1 tags, meta keywords, etc. So it's obvious that they are targeting keywords like 'car hire UK', 'pizza delivery Liverpool' etc. Some sites had a lot of articles with geo-targeted keywords, others seem to rely more on off page.

Some of the car rental sites had info about car rentals worldwide with a special 'choose country form' written with javascript. We don't know for sure how well Google handles java scripts but perhaps it's able to pull this information from there.

The sites also heavily employ UK related anchor texts in their internal linking which is another indication for Google that they are relevant to the British searchers.

Off-Page Factors:

I checked the incoming link profiles of these sites with SEO SpyGlass tool and here's what I found out:

8 to 20% of links to the websites come from .co.uk domains.

2 to 12% of anchor texts have a UK related geo modifier in them, such as UK, London, Manchester, etc.

The sites are listed in the UK business directories such as businesslook.co.uk, scoot.co.uk, thomsonlocal.com, etc.

These are strong indicators of a websites relevancy to the UK market, and Google obviously uses them when ranking .com websites in Google.co.uk

If you find more factors that contribute to higher rankings on Google UK or any other regional version of Google, do share your findings in the comments.

UK SERPs, here we come!

It's obvious that the change in the way Google handles geo-specific queries will not be limited to the UK SERPs. I'm sure we'll soon see more .com's in the Google.de and .nl, as well as more .co.uk in and .de sites in the US search results. The search globalization is on its way. You don't need to buy a .co.uk domain to rank high in the UK any more. You just need to do a little geo SEO, tweak a few texts, write a couple of articles, get a bunch of .co.uk links and there you go for the UK SERPs.

Sure, the online competition is going to be much tougher for the UK companies who got used to being shielded by their TLD 'firewall'. But as we know, everyone wins from competition - the user, the business and well Google. So who wants a piece of British traffic? I certainly do ;)