I am a huge fan of SEOmoz blog. Their beginner’s guide to SEO was the first thing I read when I started my SEO career.

In their blog, they keep me updated to a lot of things related to the SEO world, experimenting a lot, and writing things down in a way everybody can understand . And maybe this is the greatest thing: I’m not so technical -yet- , but it’s always a pleasure to read their post, first of all because I can understand.

Often their results and evidences are done using Google.com , since they are based in US. That’s perfectly logical , but at the same time their results are different from what I’m seeing here in Germany , using google.de or google.it.

Last post I read on SEOmoz was “Counting to 10 the Google way” by Dr. Pete J. Meyers  , talking about the state of SERPs is on Google.com, with differences between personalized and unpersonalized search.

Like I said, these results are done using Google.com. So I was wondering: am I gonna see the same SERPs using google.de?

First I searched for “Muppets” using Google.de and unpersonalized results (I was logged out and I added pws=0). This is the result I obtained:

Counting the way Dr. Pete did, we have 11 results when searching for “muppets” plus one ad. Skipping all the vertical results (videos, images…) we have 7 results. If we include videos, we have 10 results. So, the proportion between google.com and google.de regarding all the SERPs and SERPs without vertical results is quite the same. But what I can see here is that in google.de there is no news and showtimes integration in the SERPs, even if in the “news” section there are almost 3000 results. Curious thing is that the first two results are wikipedia entries, the english and the german one, while the official Disney site is only the third one.

I tried to search for “muppets” when I was logged in Google+, but the results are the same for me. This is because I don’t have so much people on Google+ , and almost all of the people I have are italians, so I think they are not using google.de a lot 🙂

Next research the great Dr. Pete did was searching for “pizza” and see what happened. So I did the same, always using google.de and unpersonalized method.

Here is the result:

The results are localized in Berlin, since I’m writing from this amazing city. So here we have a total of 12 results. The difference here compared to the post of Dr. Pete is that there are no Images and News results. As everybody can see, after the first two organic result we have 7 results deriving from Google Places. This is happening because Google is thinking: “hey, you’re searching for pizza. So I assume you wanna eat pizza. So there, I’ll show you where you can go and eat it”. Curious thing is that even in this case we have a pack of 7 google places results , like in Google.com. Only one Google Places result has no URL (sadly, it’s an italian pizzeria very famous in Berlin, but they don’t have a site), and none of them have site-links listed. Removing Google Places, we have a total 5 organic results.

So here what’s happening in Google.de compared to Google.com. I think it’s great to see the differences. I have the impression that Google in Europe is not invading organic results as much as it’s doing on Google.com.

Even in Europe we are ready for the invasion in 2012.