Team Fresh Egg has noticed a strange phenomenon, and it appears to be an ongoing issue from at least August 2006. It seems that home pages (and only home pages) of .com sites hosted in the UK are disappearing from Google’s results when you do a site: search and filter the results to only show pages from the UK. I’ve played around with various sites, and while the home pages pop up under the normal web results, they mysteriously vanish when you add the UK-only filter.
The Google Search News forum Lee pointed me to mentions this problem, and several people have complained of fluctuating results (e.g. they’re gone, they come back for a while, they’re gone again). While duplicate content could be an issue for some, surely it can’t serve as an explanation for all missing pages.
What do you think’s going on here? Is it a Google glitch? Are they experimenting with various filters? Does Google have a “USA a-ok, but UK can kiss my arse” mentality? Have any of you experienced a similar phenomenon?
