Google update – What's Google up too?
I’ve just spotted something hugely irregular in Google and wondered if anyone else has spotted anything?
Google ‘UK tick’ is showing the RAC as 6th for car insurance – Google.co.uk is showing them at 38th (where they normally are). With Google checking IP addresses for location i haven’t seen this much of a difference for a long time.
Has anyone else spotted anything like this happening recently? Could this be Google testing localisation?
UPDATE:
OK yesterday the RAC went down to 9th in UK pages but it was for the homepage instead of the car insurance page.
Today it has gone back but is now also 8th for car insurance in google.co.uk. This is an amazing result and they have jump 30 places over night – amazing because they are my/Soup’s client in case anyone was wondering why I’m so excited!!
DannyGuk also mentioned on Twitter that he has been seeing big changes in Google, so is their a Google update in progress??
UPDATE PART 2
OK just read a fantastic post by Aaron Wall on SEOBook – http://www.seobook.com/google-branding. Aaron has also spotted the change and believes it is down to Google giving more weight to ‘brands’ so they are looking at user stats and giving more weight to the overall site. This would make sense for the RAC as they get a lot of traffic for general motor news and for their main product area (breakdown cover). So this high volume of traffic is resulting in Google adding a huge weight to their other terms – in this case car insurance.
If anyone else has any other views please comment.