How to watch Google indexing .uk sites

[Edwin]

If you use the following query in Google, you should see (pretty much) ONLY .uk sites returned in the results, without any results from any other UK namespace extension...

You need to copy the whole of this query into the search box exactly as-is for the search to work.

site:.uk -site:.co.uk -site:.org.uk -site:.ac.uk -site:.gov.uk -site:.ltd.uk -site:.plc.uk -site:.me.uk -site:.net.uk -site:.nhs.uk -site:.police.uk -site:mod.uk -site:.sch.uk -site:.parliament.uk

As of right now, there are only a handful of sites indexed, but the fact that there are any at all is pretty good going and a testament to how quickly Google spiders and indexes material. You should see the numbers rise and rise and rise over the coming days and weeks.

BONUS: if you paste the above query into a Google Alert, I would expect that you can be sent what is effectively a daily list of newly indexed .uk sites

 

[scooter]

Cool! thanks for this.

 

[ian]

Quite a few more now, well done Edwin, decent search method.

 

[murph]

Fascinating to see the random sites being added to the index, thanks for that Edwin!

 

[Retired_Member42]

Nice to see them actually appearing in the natural index too e.g.

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=the+british+library

 

[Edwin]

Nice to see them actually appearing in the natural index too e.g.

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=the+british+library

Actually the British Library has been on BL.uk for many, many years. It's a very early pre-Nom that was grandfathered to them through a special deal they made with Nominet back in the "early days".

 

[Retired_Member42]

Actually the British Library has been on BL.uk for many, many years. It's a very early pre-Nom that was grandfathered to them through a special deal they made with Nominet back in the "early days".

Ah right, I didn't know that. I did try a bunch of them using snippets from the cached sites homepages to see if I could find a natural listing for a .uk domain but most of the ranking sites still show their old .co.uk despite the sites also being cached on the .uk version. I guess it'll take a day or two to update. Hopefully no issues arise as a result in terms of rankings...

 

[Edwin]

36 results late last night. 42 this morning. Baby steps, but steps nonetheless...

 

[Edwin]

48 now. I'm not going to keep posting updates every couple of hours, don't worry. Just wanted to make the point that progress is slow, but constant.

 

[Adam H]

Interesting to see some of them using the UK as a landing page or secondary website to their main .co.uk , that was exactly what i was considering with some of mine.

Domination of Serps from UK branded search terms

 

[Edwin]

It's been another 2 weeks, and Google claims to have indexed 174,000,000 pages specifically under .uk domains. Looks pretty healthy, and a nice improvement on 48!

 

[Stephen]

296 million .co.uk v 174 million .uk?

It's been another 2 weeks, and Google claims to have indexed 174,000,000 pages specifically under .uk domains. Looks pretty healthy, and a nice improvement on 48!

Thanks.

When I used search term "site:.co.uk" in Google for .co.uk with no other exclusion as a benchmark.

Result was a surprising "About 296,000,000 results", have I missed something?

 

[Stephen]

New numbers

It's been another 2 weeks, and Google claims to have indexed 174,000,000 pages specifically under .uk domains. Looks pretty healthy, and a nice improvement on 48!

Just done .uk search (with your helpful search term at the start of the thread) again and excluded -site:bl.uk (British Library)

Result for .uk was ;

About 3,540,000 results​

For control purposes, I did Google search on .co.uk with "site: .co.uk"

Result for .co.uk was ;

About 1,120,000,000 results​

Which is more what I would expect, than the results earlier today, on earlier posts, showing .uk was over 50% of .co.uk volume of indexed pages!