Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Okay, let’s walk through some questions. There was an interesting one from Guavarian in the U.K. and I think Rhocile like lobbied for a bunch of people to vote for this. Essentially they’re asking why for the U.K. SERPS, that’s Search Engine Result Pages, are you seeing a lot of .coms instead of .co.uks. And it’s absolutely true that if you do a search for, say, car insurance on Google.co.uk, you’re more likely to see for example tescofinance.com or Churchill.com. Some sites that are definitely U.K. focused, that are, you know, even mentioned U.K. in the title but are not necessarily .co.uks. Well, the short answer is that, you know, as we get better, we’re more willing to show .coms if we think that they’re really relevant to a given country. And so, I think everybody kind of got used to the idea that if you search on google.co.uk, you’re only going to get .uks. And that’s not really the right attitude because if the best result for a British searcher is something that ends in .com, we still want to show that to that British searcher. And so, that is probably a change that we’re not going to revert. If you see things where it’s in a relevant .com or .com that really has nothing at all to do with the U.K. or Australia or New Zealand or whatever it is that your country market is. Then we’ll definitely be interested in hearing about that, but as we continue to know more about which websites are associated with which countries, I do expect that we’ll start to show .coms a little bit more often in some different countries. And so, that’s just something where we’re getting a little bit better about detecting. You know, tescofinance.com is still about the U.K. market and it’s still really useful to a British server and we’re willing to show .coms a little bit more to people over time.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: