Google Makes International Searches Harder

I love change and convenience, but not all changes are convenient, and not all make life better.

This is one of them, as Google makes searching outside of your country a bit harder and more of a faff to do.

Settings changes are the order of the days rather than just heading to google.cc.tld.

Read this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 27th October 2017.

#SEO #SEONews #SERP #Google #InternationalSEO

Key Issues Summary:

• Google has made an annoying “for your convenience” change to the way it delivers its search results.
• Now, your location, not the Google ccTLD (country domain extension) determines the search results you see.
• This means doing international, out-of-country searches just got harder.
• Searching from Australia for UK search results now means you have to make a change in your search settings.
• This is annoying.

Key Actions To Take:

1. If looking for UK results from Australia, just going to google.co.uk is no longer enough (it was starting to get very hazy anyway).
2. You need to make an adjustment in your search settings to change the Region your results are served from.
3. You should then be able to view UK results.
4. Remember that different location searches may still be influenced by your current country and home country location. It’s unlikely to pull pure “different country” results unless you are actually located in that country.
5. Make sure you check with your rankings tools of choice that they are pulling results from a pure “chosen location” set.
6. Make sure your clients who work across international borders are aware of the difference if they check rankings manually.
7. If doing searches across borders, you will need to be more locally exact to generate local results.
8. Click here to contact me to discuss how best to do international SEO. It’s finicky and technical, but good fun.

Insights & Discussion:

Grrrrr. As an SEO this is annoying. There are plenty of times when I’d like to see rankings in a different country. Now it has just got harder. There is some user benefit to this, but not a great deal.

As a user, this is also annoying because there are plenty of times when I want to search for information from a different country. This will mean plenty of additional searches to find the magic combination which will deliver local results.

This isn’t convenient, this is a pain. The vast majority of users will have no idea about changing their search settings and for most the way things worked currently worked well enough. (Google detected location and served a mixed bag of country-local, home location and international results). They will end up doing repeated, more qualified searches, and possibly end up giving up in frustration.

For what it’s  worth, this must still be rolling out as on Safari in AU, I haven’t yet been able to replicate the setting change, but have already seen the impact of this non-localised search when quick checking issues for clients. As I say, grrrr.

More Information:

• Making Search Results More Local

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We recently released the super-exciting The State of SEO in mid-2017. Read it now.

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• Google makes a small change and butterflies in the Amazon get upset.
• This has its uses, but localising the results on a different ccTLD to your current location is a pain.
• If I want to find out things in the UK, I’d like to go to Google UK and search without having to specify “UK” in my query, thank you very much.
• Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
• Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
• Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.

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