Over the past day or two, I have been hearing reports from webmasters and SEOs that Google’s geo targeting technology has changed in a big way over in their international or localized search engines. I have one, possibly, two threads to point you over to with more details.

A Google Web Search Help thread has reports that over the weekend, the landscape for ranking of generic keywords in Google UK has drastically changed. Searches such as web hosting, mortgage, insurance, student loans and so on are no longer as specific to UK web sites and are now showing more US based sites.

I am told by an anonymous reader that for financial terms, such as mortgages, you would never see US based results in the top ten at Google UK. Clearly that makes logical sense, why would a UK searcher, who is looking for a UK mortgage, want to find information from US mortgage companies? They wouldn’t. Of course, Wikipedia type pages were the exception. I am now being told that more and more US based sites are showing for these specific UK-type queries when searching Google UK in the UK.

When I questioned if this was new, after showing that filtering them by selecting “show pages from UK” the SEO said:

The WebmasterWorld thread that is tracking Google changes in April has a post from Tedster that relates to these findings. Tedster, WebmasterWorld’s administrator, said:

This seems to be somewhat related to what is reported in the Google Web Search Help thread but not exactly.

Is Google’s geo targeting technology off a bit or is Google changing how they handle certain queries in the UK?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.