Over the last few months there has been more and more chatter in the industry about Google being broken. Could it be true and could this be the break that the newly formed Yahoo / Microsoft partnership are looking for to break into the UK?

Let’s be fair it’s going to take a lot to dislodge Google as the dominant force in the UK. Google breaking could well be a real opportunity.

Over the last few months we have begun to see Google return strange results that include a multitude of irrelevant overseas websites. Take for example the search term ‘rent a tennis court’. We see not only a Singapore listing at position 2 but a gaggle of US based apartment websites taking up the top 10 positions.

Is it only that UK companies have not optimised their websites to appear on such a term? In the past .co.uk domains and websites hosted in the UK have taken precedence over .com’s and foreign websites.

So how can we account for the change – or is Google just broken?

Could it have anything to do with the Vince Update?

Around the beginning of March SEO’s and web masters began to see significant changes in how Google were rerunning results for certain sets of keywords. The industry felt that big brands were getting a push in the rankings. However Google’s Matt Cutts was quick to head off speculation over a major change in Google’s SEO rational.

Matt said the change was not necessarily an update but rather what they would call a minor change. One of hundreds made every year.  In fact, Matt told us a Googler named Vince created this change and it had been dubbed the Vince change. This was not about pushing big brands but about factoring more trust into the algorithm on generic search phrases, having little effect on long tail search results.

The answer could be as simple as the fact that no UK based websites have the relevancy or authority to rank well. The US pages returned certainly were from higher page rank sites in much more competitive sectors. 

If we also remember of course that Google results come from well over 100 different data centres on different IP addresses, it’s not surprising that glitches and instability come from updates being made. Tennis courts are far from a core revenue earner for Google and in the UK Tennis is not exactly in the league of Football. So if a small, insignificant section of Google is not returning the same A1 standard we have some to expect, is that really an issue??

Have you seen any more drastic examples?