Google Geographic Targeting Switched Off!

[irahat]

Yes, its true, Google have switched off geographic targeting, at first I was skeptical, but after a bit more research, I have concluded that geo targeting is off, and just to show you an example,

In www.google.co.uk I perform a search for "Southbank Restaurants" as I feel like taking my girlfriend out for a meal by the thames in London, so I do the Southbank Restaurants search, and I get the following:

I am getting results from Australia, which is absurd, even though there is a place called southbank in Australia, the fact that I am searching from the UK and searching in Google UK should have meant that my results were filtered.

This just goes to show that there is no geo filtering or targeting in enforcement.

Sadly, because of this, millions of websites and webmasters have seen a decline in rankings because of the introduction of foreign websites into UK serps.

At the minute, nothing is or has been done to correct it, and with the upcoming Google Caffeine, it seems like this issue will not be resolved until Caffeine is hard launched.

So if your seeing screwy results, its most probably got some relation to geo filtering, unless your in a niche market, which is less likely to have been impacted by foreign sites.

[rsalan]

I think they are still rolling out tweaks with caffine so i think alot of things have/are been switched on/off. i have noticed a few similar things, and this does explain them. thanks for putting in more extensive research.

[mshah]

I'm from the UK and have performed the same search as you and I also get the AU results. However, I do still get local results when I type Manchester restaurants, or anything else actually - unless I specifically target locations outside of this country.

Perhaps it doesn't consider Southbank an actual place in London, therefore it displays the only Southbank or largest it can find which is in Australia.