Google rolls back American spelling update

Recently Google started forcing UK searchers to view the USA spelling of “optimisation”:

(image from Hobo UK SEO)

This was an extremely poor update from a user experience point of view – if someone types in “search engine optimisation” in Google.co.uk then Google shouldn’t assume they were searching for something which is a wrong spelling for this country.

I was glad to see this morning that the serps for this result are back to normal:

I’m sure Big Mouth Media will be happy to have their first position back!

Patrick Altoft also blogged about the original change, I’d recommend reading that for some background info. If you read it already, then go read it again if for nothing more than to see his cool new Layout. Not sure if its Thesis any more but it looks great ! You can also read Liam Delahunty’s rant on it at Online Sales.

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