A recent topic in SC brought up an interesting update with Google: they are adding country specific results to global results. And even interesting is the way they do it - instead of doing a wide scale mixture, they seem to take only #1 from country specific search and place it somewhere in top30 of global search. Take for example search phrase XHTML. When I search for XHTML in google.fi (finnish language option selected), there is our XHTML-series (in finnish) as #1. When I do a global search (no language option selected), there we are placed on 4th position right below W3C and other big names. This is new and welcome addition to Google search.
Personally I have very little to complain with this experiment, but I would sure love to get options to
a) wipe out localised results if wanted,
b) and get a more versatile selection of localised results in top30.
Interesting note is that the mixture seems to be related to keyword competiviness. So far I have found this mixture occurring only for minor to medium competed keywords, but if I look something highly competed (like "seo" or "web design") the results are still the same old without any country specific results.
As always, feel free to share your comments and notes.
After living few days in new world order, the changes seem more minor than I feared/hoped... As an observation based on logfiles, I can say that the traffic for "non-finnish & universal" keywords seems to have increased. Nothing huge, but still something you can notice by eye and with numbers...
Hopefully I'll be a lot wiser in the end of week (many schools, business etc. in finland return from holidays this week).
ok... there's definetely some sort of change/experiment going with these *universal terms* and languages. If some remember the good old google dance, this is something similar to watch...the rules and resultsets seem to flux all the time...
So far the fixed proportion theory can be trashed, same applies to putting only local / country specific sites to mixture (I'm seeing 4-6 different language sites in top10 for global search terms - which IMO makes the search totally unusable)... I think this is a good time to take a break; maybe things have settled in the morning.
This is worth looking into.
Yep, it sounds and seems as geo-targeting but there is something new in the mix...
If I use a foreign proxy the results change once again (as expected). However (suprise, surprise...), there is another finnish site (wiki in this case) in top10, and our site is nowhere to be seen. So it breaks the rule (local issue #1 get's on first page of global results)... It's still putting a finnish site in top10, but uses a different set of arguments.
Another note.So far I have seen excactly zero or one entry in top10, never two or more. ..Could it be possible that Google is using fixed proportions for embedding localized results to global resultsets? Personally I doubt this, but untill otherwise proven it's a possibility...
I did what you said, I went to Google.fi, searched for XHTML among the finish pages (suomenkielisiltä sivuilta) and I got one of your pages as the #1 result. Then I did a international search (kaikilta web-sivuilta) and I did not find your site among the top 100.
To me it has the feel of the good old geo-tareting they have done for atleast the last two years. Thanks for the warning/tip/observation.