Is Google Broken? Where’s the relevancy?
Welcome back Rankers!
I’m asking for help this week, as ever since the last Google updates, and I’m not talking about Penguin, I’m referring to the undocumented updates that were reported earlier (Maybe possum update?) . We saw an update around the 1st October then another around the 6th October. Since then we’ve noticed some odd things with certain searches. It’s almost as if Google is broken.
I’ve been trying to get my head around why this might be happening, and I haven’t dug too deep into some of these results yet, but I would be interested to know if anyone else has experienced something similar and to let me know.
Rogue Results
For example, here we have a search for ‘plumbers.’ We are seeing Melbourne results as that is where the search is being conducted from using the Google AdWords Ad Preview Tool. I’m using this to get an accurate picture of location. So that’s all good so far. However, on page two we are getting Queensland and Sydney results.
When I type in ‘plumbers emergency,’ we see Sydney as our number one result. Hmm. Now when I have an emergency plumbing situation, chances are I’m not willing to wait for one to arrive from Sydney. If I do the same search with ‘electricians emergency,’ the results show a Melbourne result followed by a Sydney one! Now the Sydney plumber may either have the largest call-out area known to man, or as someone in the office suggested, they may be so good that they can solve electrical issues over the phone. “Cut the red wire, not the blue!” The number three result is for Perth.
Not Local
If I reverse the search term and use ‘emergency electrician,’ which would be a more common search phrase, the results are all Melbourne. On page two, we do see irrelevant results from other cities.
If I try ‘SEO’ I get results for Adelaide high on page one. It used to be that you only ever saw local results, but that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore, with some results being completely unhelpful. ‘Carpet layers’ shows similar results. None of these is helpful for the user and Google never used to be like this.
I’ll change the location to Sydney and once more search for ‘plumbers emergency.’ I’m trying to work out why Google is dropping local results in favour of irrelevant locations. The number two result is a Melbourne result! ‘Electricians emergency’ for Sydney returns a Melbourne business as the number one spot.
Google, what is going on? Please fix your systems. Hopefully that’s helpful. If you have any similar results, please let me know, as I’d love to get to the bottom of this issue. See you all next week. Bye for now.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
