Google 'Optimization'

Over the last few days there has been one change on Google that has made UK SEO companies sit up and take notice. It’s a change that will, if permanent, will affect every single online marketing company there is.

What is this incredible change I hear you shout excitedly?!

The change is this; Google appear to want the good people of the UK to speak American. Now, before anyone starts, I’ve got nothing against American’s. In fact one of my closest colleagues in my old job was from the States. No, the problem I have is that I don’t like being forced to spell things the wrong way.

What am I talking about?

I noticed yesterday that a search on Google.co.uk for the terms ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and ‘Website Optimisation’ were producing interesting results. Sites that I’ve not seen in the top 10 positions before were suddenly sitting proudly on the first page of Google.

You might think that there’s nothing wrong with that. But that would be where you were wrong.

The reason that these searches were producing interesting results was because Google was now instantly altering my keyword search from ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ to ‘Search Engine Optimization’. The UK spelling of the word ‘Optimisation’ was now being swapped with the American spelling; ‘Optimization’.

Why? Who knows. Previously a search for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ always resulted in Google asking “Did you mean ‘Search Engine Optimization’”, to which we would just ignore and happily look through the results for the term we searched for.

This has now changed and unfortunately for the worse.

What we don’t know yet is if this change is permanent. Although we hope not, there is every chance that this is something that Google will want to roll out for the foreseeable future and this will mean big problems for SEO companies based within the UK.

All of a sudden the terms that they are found for will almost become void, which ultimately means that only way around this would be to target American spellings of industry related words.

This will result in even tougher competition for terms, which can only be bad news for all SEO firms.

We all await further developments. Google it’s over to you.