yell.com taking up premium position on search resu

today when I did a search which included a geographical location ie web designer london, the result showed one sponsored listing followed by 3 local results with a map from yell.com and a more local results link. When I clicked more it took me through to google maps beta and listed the entire yell.com directory results for web designers in london ie very relevant adverts

Obviously yell are paying google but my thoughts are if google are going to relegate ppc adverts to less prominent positions (ie right column only) maybe I'd be better putting my advertising bucks with yell. They'd also give me a more prominent listing in their paper directiry.

Do you know if that is only in the UK? I haven't seen any yell listings so far.

I was doing a search for a uk location but i hadn't restricted my search to uk only. I guess it might be uk 'feature' but I doubt google would do any change in the uk first. More likely they do similar in usa.

You know that when you go to Goolge you're automatically routed to the local version for searches, right?

I mean, I'm in Canada, and unless I specifically set things to keep me at www.google.com when I go there (cookies), I'm automatically routed to www.google.ca.

Same goes for everyone.

So, you might well type www.google.com into your address bar, but they will default you to www.google.co.uk base don your location, which then automatically skews results with a local flavour.

I shocked the heck out of myself one night with my new laptop when I went to Google and suddenly saw my website listed at the top for most of the searches I was trying. I wanted to dnace, but felt soemthing was off...it was.

I hadn't "told" Google to just leave me at the freakin' .com space, so they sent me to the .ca space, whereupon my site seems to have ranked well. I'm Canadian and say so on the website, so even though my server is locate din the US, Google "feels" I'm Canadian, so I rank better here than in the normal .com space...

Could well be the results you are seeing are as a result of this "localization" effect.

Yeah I know, I was using google.co.uk - it gives me the option to search the web or pages from the uk. I was indicating that I was 'searching the web' not just uk pages.

Ah, I see...but that option doesn't take away how they skew for local results - at least I don't think it does.

But there;s is still my initial point that I can get a top 3 placement with a nice location map (which I guess a someone who searches for a local supplier would like) by virtue of my yell listing.

Google has devalued its PPC by no longer not making these positions available to its PPC advertisers.

When I typed web designer london into a (U.S.) Google search today yell.com only has one ad at the very bottom of the first page of results. I tried the same search at Google U.K. and didn't see them at all.

Google tests different features all the time and they've had more than their share of "improvements" that some of us would call "bugs". Are you still seeing all yell listings now?

it's the same EVERYTIME I try search on google.co.uk

Google shows different results to different searchers and sometimes even different results to the SAME searcher.