Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:24:01 by Matt Hopkins
Google's search engine results pages (SERPS) are increasingly becoming more localised. If you wanted to see the results that people in Australia get on google.com.au when searching for terms like "SEO" then you simply accessed the regional site. But now, the results you get from any regional site are adjusted slightly to reflect your current location.
There is a way to tell Google that you want the same results that others see in a given location. I blogged about this approach a bit back in January (see How to see Google.com USA results from a different country), but I wanted to follow up and highlight some additional parameters that you can use to be even more specific.
Perform a search in Google and then look at the URL of the Google results. You will notice that there are some parameters in the URL that tell Google what you are searching for. For example, a search for "pizza" will have a URL like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=pizza
Where the "q" is the query/question and "pizza" is the search request.
By adding some additional parameters to the URL of this search, we can tell Google that we want to see results as would be seen by users in a specific geographic location. These parameters are:
gl = Country code (see full list)
gll = Lat & Long
gr = Worldwide region code (see full list )
gcs = City (Note that "gr" must be set to to a relevant region for this to work -- see full list )
gpc = Zip code (USA-only)
gm = Metropolitan areas of US (see full list )
And so, let's day that we wanted to modify our search to see what results would appear if we were located in Dallas, Texas (USA) - my hometown. We would modify the URL as follows:
http://www.google.com/search?q=pizza&gl=US&gm=623
Note that "gm=623" is the Metropolitan area for Dallas.
Google provides a tool for Adwords advertisers to preview their ads as they would appear in different locales called the Adwords Preview Wizard - www.google.com/adpreview.
You can use this tool to select the geolocation and then simply view the source of the HTML frame that is created at the bottom of the page... and extract the URL that is being used to display the results.
All you need to do is specify the search term, engine, and region and then hit search. Then click on the frame properties (right click - "This Frame" and "View Frame Source" in Firefox). Once you have the HTML open, copy the GL,GM,GR, & GCS params out of the URL and paste onto the end of your search.
The main problem is that this seems to work fine for previewing Adwords Ads and works fine for Organic listings on Google.com in the USA (with US-based params)... but does not seem to have been implemented properly on Google.co.uk for the UK terms... too bad as this could be very handy indeed to better understand the performance of search campaigns with a local emphasis.
Matt Hopkins
Managing Director |
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