Almost a month to date since the last update of Irish results, Google has mashed the Irish results once again. If you are checking your local rankings in Ireland for a site that targets Ireland do your best to ignore all the results this week.
Last month when Google did this same update I freaked a bit wondering what the hell was going on. After all my searching last month to find an answer i did, but not after I made the post about the drop in Google rankings. The answer is rather simple. Google is turning down the local bump it is giving to local sites. This will settle again simply because the results now are less helpful or relevant to local searchers.
This morning when I search for some of my main search terms they are still there, though instead of being somewhere between 1 and 5 most have dropped to between 8 and 20. However if I change the search to Google.ie and results only from Ireland, I can see there is little difference to normal – this is why I think it will all settle back again within a few days.
Another slight issue is that I don’t want to give clients ranking reports during this period – trying to explain this makes me sound like I am trying to cover for some inefficiency on my part.
Finally add this to the current update on the Yahoo! servers where I pull back link data from and you just have a crap week. Every few weeks the servers in Yahoo! where I get the back link data updates and gives results that are far short of actual results. I look forward to the time later this year when all the Yahoo! servers shut down and Bing gives us the search results. Now that will be real fun.
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