Google.co.uk and Google.com Are Different.
If you carry out a search for “spanish inland properties” using www.google.co.uk and the “from the Web” option Google will return 103,000 competing pages. If you carry out the same search using the “pages from the UK” option you will get 91,300 competing pages and if you carry out the same search using www.google.com this will result in 103,000 competing pages as you would expect.
Now to really confuse matters carrying out the same search on google.es (really a Spanish language site) results in 18,100,000 competing pages, roughly 180,000 times more pages than on google.com. Total confusion. Repeat the search using the “pages in Spanish” option results in 45,000 competing pages, this is more understandable. Again repeat the search in “pages from Spain” results in 24,200 competing pages.
The website www.spanish-inland-properties.com, has the following results.
| Search Engine |
Results From |
Competing Pages |
Position |
| google.com | N/A | 103,000 | 1 |
| google.co.uk | web | 103,000 | 1 |
| google.co.uk | UK | 91,300 | 1 |
| google.es | web | 103,000 | 1 |
| google.es | In Spanish | 18,100,00 | 1 |
| google.es | from Spain | 24,200 | None |
As spanish-inland-properties is hosted in the UK you might think that it would have a lower ranking in google.es “pages from spain” and that is certainly the case. It does not appear on the first four pages. Yet to confuse matters www.spanish-country-holidays.com gets a mention on page two because it has “spanish inland properties” mentioned in its description - yet is hosted on the same server as Spanish-inland-properties.
Why is this? No one outside of Google knows the exact answer but it probably boils down to a combination of factors.
- Where web sites are hosted. This has the greatest influence on the results returned. Google probably gives a higher weighting to web sites hosted in the UK when a searcher is looking for results from the UK.
- Differing algorithms. There is anecdotal evidence that Google UK uses a slightly different algorithm to its .com relation. The results from pages from the UK certainly seem to have more anomalies than those in the US.
- Using different data centers. Google uses a large number of data centers scattered throughout the globe and the data held on each differs slightly.
- Local search results. Google has been rolling out a system that takes into account the IP address of the searcher. The systemr serves results that include businesses that are local to the searcher. This is set to become more important as time passes.
- Top level domain extensions. Years ago this was more important but nowadays has little, if any, influence on the results.
It should be born in mind that only about one in seven searchers using www.google.co.uk select the pages from the UK option, see this survey.