info [ AT ] redcardinal [ DOT ] ie
More Evidence of Google Geotargeting Gone Bad
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Google is having serious problems with geotargeting. I’ve previously written my thoughts on the future of google geotargeting, and various other posts ranging from set-up and usage of geotargeting right through to Local Search geotrageting.
Well today I see yet more evidence that something is terribly wrong with geotargeting:
Yahoo France appears in ‘pages from Ireland’ searches on google.ie
Here’s the query I used.
I suppose there’s some small chance that Yahoo! have geotarget their FR content to Ireland, but the servers appear to be in the UK. But also returning French results when my browser language is set to EN also smacks to me of serious problems.
Hopefully this and other problems will be fixed, but as I mentioned in the future of google geotargeting post I have a feeling big changes may be on the cards…
Ya know i’m starting to think that google is on a trend toward suckage, these days they will happily substitute results with stuff you are not looking for at all because they assume you are dumb and must have misspelled something. Now with wave and chrome OS and all sorts of shitty web apps they are trying to take over personal computing just to get more eyeballs & data to mine for their advertisers
Comment by Dankoozy — July 27, 2009 @ 5:10 pm
I tweeted about this earlier this morning. The results are a joke at the moment with US and Australian results in .co.uk queries.
I haven’t had French or non-English results yet – but there’s time I guess!
My tweet was along the lines that Google should give up on geo-targeting until it can manage to do it properly. Perhaps it works in the states but it certainly doesn’t work well in the UK.
Comment by Gregor — July 27, 2009 @ 6:14 pm
@Dan – for the last while Google’s index and the way they deliver results has been a bit messed up. I actually think they made some major change or other that didn’t go to plan, or had some unintended side-effects.
@Gregor – I *hope* it will just be a matter of time before things get better once more. They dont like when the UX is poor, so you can bet they’re working hard on making things better.
Rgds to both
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — July 28, 2009 @ 2:32 pm
See also here: http://www.multilingual-search.com/do-you-need-unique-content-to-target-ireland/08/09/2009
drill into thread: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0f6f8b8ce4a3e78c&hl=en
Comment by The Localization Girls — September 9, 2009 @ 4:41 pm