Vanished from the UK search in Google.co.uk?

No Uk Search Results?

Google.co.uk

Has your .com or .net profile vanished from the UK search in Google.co.uk?

If so then you may well be a victim of a long standing problem with using a .com or .net domain when targeting the UK, what you will find is that there will still be a profile in worldwide results but when you search the UK only results the profile will have gone.

Lets set the scenario:- Website A is a property website and has a page 1 listing in Google.co.uk for the search term Property in London, it has enjoyed this position for a year or more and has a great visitor level from this and other generic terms that have good listings. The website owner has worked hard to maintain this profile and in turn the page one listing attracts many good inbound links. The site is successful and drives business well and in addition to this search term there are many other generic terms sending in visitors, many of these are from UK searches.

Then one Monday morning there are only half of the usual number of enquiries and a big drop off in visitors, the first thing the webmaster does is check his listings, this is usually done by querying the worldwide results from Google.co.uk, this shows the listings are stable and this confuses the issue. How can my traffic drop and my enquiries drop and yet my listings are the same.

UK results confusion:

For the average webmaster it will be some time before he finds out that the listings are not consistent and that the UK results only profile is devoid of any generic search listings, even when this is discovered it may still be misleading as why these search results have disappeared. Most webmasters will be looking through page after page of results trying to find their generic listing in vain, then if they are lucky an internal page will be listed on page 50 and there will be no sign of the root url (homepage).

Yes, I know this will be sounding very familiar to you, in fact it has been experienced by us at High Position on a number of occasions over the last 12 months. The first time it happened we quickly realized what the problem was and then set about trying to resolve it, but then we have a team of experienced SEO people and that of course is an advantage that many people reading this won’t have.

Google drops .com or .co.uk:

In almost every case where the above example is the experience the problem will be centered on one issue and that will be that Google has dropped the .com or .net homepage from its UK results database. This is not due to non compliance or penalties for bad practice and in almost every case the website will be hosted on a UK platform but strangely the worldwide search in Google.co.uk will still show the site well listed.

There is a very important point to grasp when trying to understand what is happening, what many people don’t realize is that for the average site most of the traffic and generic listings are driven by the homepage or root url, this is because for most searches the top pages are driven by other peoples homepages and that is the true competition. Of course for the average website this means the internal pages are often not competitive enough to feature on page 1 when they are up against other sites homepages. The important lesson here is that if you lose the profile for your homepage, then with it goes much of the generic keyword profile in search results and of course the visitor numbers drop sharply.

How do I tell if my site is affected by the UK only search issue?

Check to see if you are listed in a Google worldwide search in Google.co.uk but do not show for these search terms when the UK results only option is ticked.
You have lost a large volume of traffic but have made no significant changes or updates.
Your enquiries drop significantly.
Your Adwords campaign is costing you more.
Your top keywords in the server stats show a marked drop in referrals.

If this happens to you then check out the following and ensure that you qualify for all the points:

Your site is in good order from an SEO perspective.
You have not made any major changes lately
Your site is more than 5 months old.
You have had solid positions in worldwide and UK results
You are hosted in the UK
You have a good proportion of UK based inbound links
You have only been missing for 10 weeks or less
You have referenced UK in a variety of locations
You have used the maps facility
The server and domain administration is spot on
The navigation urls are correctly formatted
You have initiated quality links in the last 4 months.

Do not panic:

If you can confidently say that you meet the above criteria then whatever you do you must avoid any knee jerk reactions, in many cases this process is entirely out of your hands and if you have passed the check above then it may be that you have to sit tight. There is no need to make radical changes to try and recapture the listings, once the homepage is back in the index the generic listings will usually return. In fact very often they will be better than they were, this is a sure indication that this is some process that Google are testing.

If you fail to meet the criteria:

If you do not meet the criteria above then you need to work on your website, improve these areas whilst you wait for Google to re-index the page, failing any of the above can be a contributory factor to the repeated dropping of the page.

Why does this happen?

There is much speculation at the moment, one theory is that this is about .co.uk orientated names being relevant to UK business and .com and .net being more relevant to international business but in my opinion this is not the case. In real terms this is one of those mysteries which may or may not be explained further down the line, what it does do though is cause confusion and panic among webmasters, especially those who are responsible to clients, in this instance they will be under pressure for something they have no control over.

If you are one of those webmasters it may do you no harm to link to this article and enable your clients to read it, it may just take the heat of the situation long enough for the listings to return.