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A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting that when searching over at AOL Search UK, and restricting pages to just "UK Only," the results you get are rarely ever from .net top-level domains.
WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, confirmed this to be the case:
I just went to the aol.co.uk webite and did "UK only" searches such as "keyword inurl:.com" -- you're right, AOL is choosing to show only .co.uk and .org.uk for their "UK only" searches. Not so Google.co.uk, where any domain extension can be found.
He adds that when doing a site command for .net TLDs, only a few come up. For example, a site:.net returns for me only 204 results.
This is probably a tweak that AOL set for this certain search criteria. Google powers AOL Search, but AOL is allowed to make changes to the results - if they see fit. They must feel the TLD is more important than the address on the site or the location of the server.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Charles
01/16/2008 11:13 am
Well, this totally sucks. I have quite a few .nets as the .coms and .co.uk are held by domainers making money from PPC, whereas I develop and SEO. They are very UK - it's just I can't get the appropriate .uk - this is a very bad move for AOL, not just for developers, but for consumers too.