Today we attended a presentation with Matt Cutts (Google Webmasters Guru) in the Google Building in Dublin organized by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce. The presentation was entertaining and interesting and Matt was very witty. The deep technical details were spared since half of the audience were not SEO savvy but it was good to hear that we are doing the right things in the field of search engine optimisation.
After his presentation there was a Q&A session and we asked a question – “If we search for a term on Google.ie, what’s the difference between the search results returned from ‘the web’ and ‘pages from Ireland’ (remember were searching from the .ie domain).
Keeping in mind that Google has changed their homepage recently which resulted in localised search being harder to find and even though you visit the local domain (google.ie or google.co.uk etc) the default search results returned are from’the web’ and ‘Pages from Ireland’ can sometimes be different.
Matt Cutts quickly answeredthat the Google search engine will automatically try to find the most related results based on the geographical location in the URL and he used the example of searching for the term “bank”. The results were when going to google.com Bank of America was first while in google.com.au the Australian Westpac bank would be the first returned etc. So in this example Google seems to localised results event though you don’t specify the ‘the web’ and Pages from Ireland” option.
However
Try less popular terms and there are inconsistencies (try Seo Services or flu symptoms or banking advice etc) there are inconsistencies in the two results.
Google - the differences between web versus Pages from Ireland
Matt can you give us an answer why this is?
Finally to return to the recent changes in the search pages that Google have begun to test/rollout. When you offered the user the ability to select where you would like Google to search from – ‘the web’ or ‘Pages from the Country’ it was clear that the search results would/could be different.
Google - Current UK homepage versus Ireland Homepage
So final question to Matt…Now that the option has been taken away from the homepage is there any need for a ‘the web’ and ‘Pages from Ireland’ if we are on the google.ie domain?
Finally Matt, thank you for taking the time out today to present to us all and for bringing the sun to Dublin.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by DPFOC, Hemant Malav and Arekibo, Arekibo. Arekibo said: Google…what is the point of showing ‘the web’ and ‘Pages from’ option? @mattcutts can you help? New blog post – http://bit.ly/98F3A6 [...]