Google never ceases to amaze at it’s antics, and the closer you watch it the wierder it often is, but this is possibly even the strangest turn of events we’ve seen on our experimental site since it’s launch 13 months ago.

If you’re not a regular reader yesterdays events need a  little context, so here’s the background..

Only a week ago, we flipped the Google geo targeting switch inside WMT to UK and see what happens. We are hosted in the US and the GEO Targeting was previously set to Spain, however our strongest rankings have always been in the US.

Way back on Mar 21st on the spec ops blog we announced the targeting of the phrase “Small Business SEO” in this post.

In the nearly nine months since then we’ve been as high as #10 for the term, but more usually #12 to #17 (Google.com only) the last few weeks, and as we’re not pushing that term any more, we arent expecting it to do much more than gradually creep upwards as our big targets, SEO & SEO services do..

On Google.co.uk, the site has not once ranked inside the 100 for that term, once, ever.

Yesterday on Google.co.uk its appeared straight in at #2 !!

for both small business seo…

& small business seo services LOL!!

So who reckons this is Google’s Geo targeting giving us a leg up in the UK then, a mere 7 days after we requested it? From around #120, straight to #2.. ?    Nah.. 

This again looks like the same algo dial tweaking we’ve seen over the last few weeks.

There’s some kind of “disconnection” between inner pages and index page, and when the dials are twisted far enough, some of our inner pages have a tendency to leap, like this.

It won’t last, (edit 20-12 it dropped to 38 next day) but it looks pretty firm at the moment

On a related and possibly not-so-coincidental note, Woopra also alerted us a large rise in hits from people searching for info on Google filters and Algo changes today, so it looks like others are seeing strangeness too?

& bizarely enough the date yesterday was the 18th, exactly 13 months to the date of launch of the site.

coincidences coincidences coincidences…

hmm.

edit 19-12-08 same page #11 for SEO Services on Google Malta..