MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Barry Schwartz of searchengineland.com has written that Yahoo! now redirects those who use their search platform to their country’s version of the search engine by default. He relays information directly from his editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan, who at the time of the post was in the UK.

According to Danny, Yahoo! will now redirect someone searching within the UK to the “UK & Ireland” Website. The searcher will initially be allowed to opt out and return to the main Yahoo! domain, which will then return as their default page, unless they forego this option, in which case they remain “local”. A laymen, or average search engine user, can still easily reach a country site version by typing in the address URL into their browser address bar. The redirect only happens when someone from Germany, for example, tries to access Yahoo.com , and are automatically taken to their local version.

The SEOCO blog reports through the grapevine that de.yahoo.com (the German site) now receives all yahoo.com redirected visitors, implying that that the change has more or less been effected world-wide.

This raises a ranking question: are those who rank for search phrases in the UK & Ireland or other country sites going to suddenly receive a boosted influx of traffic? Logically thinking, that may well be a side effect.

Recently, major search engines have placed a special emphasis on returning local-kind results to local people, meaning that someone in Australia will be handed a platter of fresh Australian results, depending on what they search for. The logical thing here is that giving someone results relevant to their area, rather than from the great random index, will have more chance of satisfying their initial need .

This works if you’re looking to browse the racks of your local clothing retailer, or check up the play-times for your favourite up and coming cinema nouveau. If, however, you want traffic department records from the lost Alaskan village of Kotzebue, and you live in West End London, you may be need to forgo any local website material and broaden your scope.

This is all well and good, since it decreases the entropy of the world’s information, and helps people get what they need faster. My problem is that the story has another side. There is the fact that a website, no matter how international by theme, can no longer expect to appear as prominently in world-wide search results in all countries as before, because major search engines are looking at factors to determine the location of their establishment. They look at where the site is hosted, the domain suffix (.com or .co.za), and any location information stated within the site text, such as a physical address. They probably also scan directory listings pointing to the site such as Dmoz or the Yahoo! directory.

This condition, while helping return relevance for some, limits the whole, and actually creates more work. Now webmasters must duplicate sites and register domains in all relevant countries to reach their target audience. If your site is three thousand pages strong, imagine the implication of re-writing all the content into several different languages. Most don’t really have all the time and resources in the world needed to address these issues.

I think the choice should be given to the searchers. Such functions should not occur in the background, or hidden within some algorithmic condition. They should be openly selectable by the public, more than just in a “pages in UK” option box, or a “local country-specific only” webpage index . Search engines have to keep adapting to facilitate the range of information consumers in the world, and hopefully everyone can be kept happy in the long-run.