Organised Petition - Google Local Search criteria

[webasylum]

Hi everybody,
Whether we like it or not...Google takes the Lion's share of online search queries! and they are notoriously hard to have direct dialogue with...... but when many people around the Globe join together in one voice about a specific problem they do listen...

Now here's the problem. For businesses who attract customers from search engines where location is important - the accurate profiling of their online website is extremely important. Google introduced local search options in many countries around the world in response to people asking for more localised and specific search results to where the enquirer was based. But Google based their algorithm to identify location based on the location of the hosting provider. Thus, completely ignoring the idea of a competitive global market place for such things as domain name sellers and hosting providers!!!

Therefore businesses based in the UK for instance who have hosting from a supplier in the USA is automatically at a disadvantage within Googles SERP's as Google is effectively filtering against such sites in their results. What makes this worse is that Google mistakenly think a .COM is a USA business in such instances (.US is the specific one for this) !!! instead of it being the TLD of a COMmercial business anywhere in the world. For an example - search for "Paintball Surrey" under Google World Search and see where www.bullswood.com appears - and then research under google.co.uk and UK local search and find the domain???? Can you find it? Google have been told directly that the bullswood domain is a company based in the UK, it has code in the page that identifies its in the UK, and when it was hosted in the UK it was No.1 in the SERPs for the local uk search!

This is the same for other countries in Google, An easy solution would be to allow webmaster's in their Google Webmaster Panel manually allocate the focus region that we wnat Google to rank their website for.

Think clearly about this as it affects many of us in subtle ways, people searching the web not getting a true picture; website owners being prevented from reaching everybody; and hosting firms wishing to attract overseas business. I am raising this issue on many top webmaster Forums and want to create a buzz about this issue. What do you think? and who will help me?