More UK SERPs Craziness
This morning, Paul Carpenter pointed out some UK results still showing irrelevant US websites. Yesterday I noticed an example of my own. Check out the following SERP:
Doesn’t look like much wrong there, does it? However, if you look a little closer at the Paypal result (sorry Paypal), and do a bit of digging, you’ll notice that this is another example of Google serving the wrong results to Google UK users. You see, Paypal Student Accounts is a new service from Paypal (launched in August of this year by the looks of it), and is “a fast and secure way for U.S. teens to shop online using PayPal”. Notice the bit that I’ve highlighted? I even tried signing up for the product (as a parent), but I got the following message from Paypal:
So it would appear, that this product isn’t yet available in the UK, yet Google deems it relevant for us to see it. A little further digging around in Google Trends shows the following data:
This is US specific data for the query “student accounts”. You’ll noticed an extended peak (probably around August time) for the term, to coincide with when Paypal introduces student accounts. Is this what’s causing Paypal to perform so well here? Incidentally, if you look at backlinks to their page that ranks, there are very few. Are Google looking at global search trends to influence localised results?
The example highlighted above isn’t trivial – I doubt many people will have spotted it, but Google could easily rectify it by giving preference to UK hosted websites.
a fast and secure way for U.S. teens to shop online using PayPal
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