US .com page appearing in Google UK even though there`s UK equivalent via rel="alternate"
I’ve had a fairly strange problem occur within organic Google search and was hoping to get some insight. When we’re putting in some search queries in Google UK, the SERP sometimes shows both our US (.com) and UK (.co.uk) results on the page. The .com page that appears is a page more targeted for the search query but we have a regional version which I expect should rank instead. The .co.uk page that appears is the homepage which is less relevant for the target keyword. I made sure that all our pages are properly using rel=”alternate” to signal that there are regional versions of the same page.
The .com pages that appear have an equivalent .co.uk page but I’m not sure why Google is showing the .com over .co.uk. Is rel=”alternate” a directive for the search algorithm or is it seen more as a suggestion? I want to try getting the pages so that only the regional pages will appear for regional searches.
This is a recent trend which we didn’t see a few months ago. It also appears to be affecting only UK at the moment. My best guess is that Google thinks the .com page is the best result for the particular search query and bypassing the rel=”alternate” tag to display .com’s page instead. Is there any way to prevent this? Thanks for any feedback.
