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Fear, uncertainty and doubt

Searchengineoptimization has always been a field in which well-founded insights are a scarce commodity. There may be a number of statements that finds a consensus with most people in the field but there are still large tracts which are subject to personal estimates and considerations. This leaves a lot of room for speculation – and I want to write about exactly that point. Many people are accusing Google of intentionally sowing confusion and uncertainties. I rather think that the ones sowing (false) rumors are blogs, forums and companies – be it due to ignorance or because they are interested in certain developments. For a few days now, we have another such case haunting the blogs and the media:

NTT Europe, a Europe-wide provider for hosting solutions, commissioned an experiment to evaluate how much local hosting influences Google-rankings. The experiment consisted of 25 searchqueries that were entered by users from the respective countries. They first used the default-search and then the choice “sites from Germany”. Then they resolved the country in which the first five results were hosted. The gentle reader might already suspect this, the result was that, for searches for “sites from Germany”, Google usually found sites that were hosted in Germany. Seeing that this statement is not quite so surprising, even when fitted with a lofty slogan, they had to come up with something else. They bumped into the Hitwise statement that about 14 to 30 percent of Google-users are using the “sites from countryXY” feature from time to time. Combine both and you have the finding that you could loose up to 30 percent of the traffic if the site is not hosted in the respective country. Even though the generalizations and logical-leaps should already have been enough, NTT Europe decided to just turn the whole story around and keep generalizing it for the headlines so that they can now claim: “NTT Europe Online: local hosting enhances Google-rating by 30 percent”.

This statement is now on the table. It is very rare for anyone to take the time to scrutinize the actual procedures as well as the deliberations that went into this statement. This is also the reason why so many blogs are putting this story online without reflecting upon it, which, in turn, gets this nonsense slowly integrated into the “SEO-general-knowledge”. I was a little surprised this morning when I saw that the Handelsblatt had adopting this subject and how they dealt with it. Being truncated and generalized again, under the headline of “server-location decides Google-ranking”, I get to read that “the relevance of websites in Google [...] is determined through the so-called PageRank” and that a local country-domain has a “verifiable, positive effect on the results for a search in Google”. What utter nonsense! Here we have major parts of a press release that get adopted 1:1 by a journalist, inaccuracies as well as untruths which are bolstered as well as added and the whole thing is whisked up into a text that can not live up to the requirements that are posed by a reputable financial newspaper.

Please do not get me wrong: I am pleased with any contribution that gives thought to the functioning and mechanics of Google. Tests and analyses are the foundations of solid SEO-work. But for an industry which is dominated by so many uncertainties, assertions, like those posed by NTT Europe, are extremely counterproductive. I wish that bloggers and forum-user would scrutinize such statements a little more acutely – while I actually expect this from journalists.