This year has been an eventful year so far for Google. The recession means nothing when it comes to this search giant, and its apparent when you see how many companies are desperate to survive with their limited marketing budget. More and more have left television advertising and moved into Google’s pay per click market, which is just as well considering Google UK has had an apparent update which has seen a mixup in the search results.

The issue affects a variety of markets and industries, although, some areas are unaffected, its still not clear what has happened and why, although we have seen a large fluctuation due to foreign websites being returned in UK searches. This means your average search might throw up results from the USA, Canada, India, even Norway? in UK results? Strange? We think so.

It seems Google may have tripped up with its evaluation method on website geographics, this update, unlike any other has seen a decline in positions for quality websites, that are popular, have good popularity, and had been established for a long period of time.

We see different top level domains being returned in search, everything from .de to .nl, we have lots of results that have foreign results mixed in with them. For example, a search for Restaurants in Kent made from Google.co.uk returns a result within Yahoo that returns restaurants in Kent WA? which is in the USA.

Although the query is relative, the listing isn’t especially since your search has been conducted from the UK. So why has Google gone topsy turvey? well the answer has yet to be uncovered, although we suspect that it is an error due in part to an algorithm change that had not been put together correctly, or a change that was supposed to further devalue on things such as geographics.

Google introduced geographic targeting to help tailor search queries to the region the user was searching for, after all, what good is an American site to someone looking to buy a car online in the UK?.

The results have been affected mainly because of the geographic issues with Google’s SERPS which has lead to foreign top level domains and other foreign websites being returned incorrectly. This shift has knocked websites out of the top 10 on Google, some websites have reported complete drop outs.

There has been many discussions between those within SEO communities, much speculation has been put out as it being a brand issue, which we have seen to be incorrect. Some have posted on big brands being targetted but evidence shows this not to be the case, instead we have seen declines only because of the replaced results being from a different geographic region.

We have also been keeping an eye on our clients day to day positions, but we see nothing out of the ordinary, which could possibly indicate that only certain markets are affected, for example, the financial market may have suffered significantly within Google UK, whilst the Holiday market may remain untouched, with only typical fluctuation generated as a result of a typical index update.

Its too early to understand exactly why Google has made this change, although, it is suspected that a fix will be rolled out to return geographic filtering to its previous state.

This might stop so many unreliable results and help restore websites that previously ranked well into a pole position. Google has many plans to continue rolling out strict changes to help stay one step ahead of the black hat and spam based SEO market.

But will these updates really help? In many instances we have seen changes to the way Google places emphasis on factors, everything from title tags to backlinks, the evaluation weight placed on these factors seems to change, causing quality unestablished websites to have a temporary spot in the limelight before dropping out of the top 10 pages.

Have you been affected by the update? if so why not leave a comment about what has happened, when you saw the ranking decline and any other relevant information.