In a short post on his personal blog wherein he answers not so personal questions and more Google-related questions, Google’s Matt Cutts clarified on a popular query thrown by UK Google searchers. The question was:
Why are .com sites ranking highly in Google UK SERPS?
For instance if you go to google.co.uk and enter the search term – “car insurance”, the first few results that will be displayed in the SERPS are all pointing to sites with TLDs .com rather than the more geographic specific sites that end in “.co.uk”
According to Matt, SERPS like these that show up in Google UK, or in any of Google’s country specific sub-domains are normal Google standards. Location-specific SERPS are not yet really implemented across Google networks. For as long as those sites with .com TLDs are relevant to the search term, Google will continue to rank them higher than sites that end with .co.uk. provided those sites are relevant search results.
As for off topic .coms that appear in SERPS of specific search results, Matt Cutts is encouraging users to point them out so that the Google engineers can take a look at them and investigate whether these should be corrected or not.
Yes, there are still some results in Google UK that appear despite having no relation to the search term. Matt says that this is part of an unrelated ranking experiment that they need to change.
So, if you’ve encountered off topic .com results while doing specific searches on Google UK and you feel that these results should not rank higher, you might want to bring this to the attention of the Google engineers by leaving a comment on Matt’s post.
