UK and GB when selecting targeted engines in campaign management

[Grumpy_Carl]

HI

Anyone know the difference between selecting UK or GB when choosing your engines to track keyword rankings? Is it that one of the options only includes pages from the UK while the other tracks all pages, but from a UK rankings point of view - ie pages hosted overseas will still rank. - if so, which is which?

Or, and this is very unlikely, is it simply that the GB data does not include Northern  Ireland as the UK is technically the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. NI is in UK but not in GB. Nice and confusing!

Thanks

[jamiemcdermott2]

Hi Jon,

Your response is now over 2 years old and the issue is still there. When I switch between ranking for UK and GB, I get different results. For example I have 2.24% viability for GB and 2.36 for UK.

Can we standardise on one so we can focus our efforts?

[StudentSEO]

For locales, should be using en-GB though, as that is the ISO standard, and it's best to keep to that for hreflang etc, surely. http://www.andiamo.co.uk/resources/iso-language-codes

[david-mazepress]

How does this effect bing and yahoo? both only have a GB option, no UK option. It seems confusing to set

1. Google en-UK

2. Google mobile en-UK

3. Bing en-GB

4. Yahoo en-GB

So while UK might be more accurate for Google than GB, for UK sites using Moz they will need to be aware that Google is UK and the other two are GB and why that really doesn't matter at all.

OR

Could we just change all 4 options so they have (United Kingdom) written at the end to make it obvious?

Thanks

[jon.white]

Hey guys! I am product lead on Moz Analytics, I am going to dig into this now and give you guys an update.  Thanks for your patience.

[PeopleHR]

Actually there is a difference, when you select one over the other the count of keywords changes -- so what's happening, which one is correct

[Gordon_Hall]

Not that it's an issue, but when will this be taken out, as it's still causing confusion and it's nearly a year since we saw this reply?

Thanks

[adamf]

Very good question. I dug in a little bit and found out that both the Great Britain and United Kingdom option are exactly the same behind the scenes. Both return rankings for google.co.uk. I'm not sure how the GB option got in there, but we'll take it out soon and just leave the UK option.

For any people that chose GB in the past, their campaigns will continue to work and pull UK results.

Sorry for the confusion!

Adam

[Devin_Anderson]

Hi Carl,

As I understand it SEOmoz just reads your rankings from the search engines themselves. All you do in your campaign setup settings is tell it which SERP to read - then it's up to the search engines themselves to determine which pages are geographically relevant.

If you select 'Google United Kingdom' SEOmoz would monitor your rankings on Google.co.uk. There is no Google.co.gb or Google.gb, so I'd imagine selecting Great Britain will monitor .co.uk as well.

Also, if you go into Google Webmaster tools, you'll notice can't set Northern Ireland as your website's geographic target. There's rarely a distinction between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland on the Internet.