Dawn Wentzell

SERP Weirdness: Taco Bell

Posted on January 24th, 2011 in internet marketing

With news of the class action suit against Taco Bell’s “beef” content, and having to be careful about my diet because I am gluten intolerant, I decided I wanted to check out Taco Bell’s nutritional information. I quickly pulled up Google and did a search for [taco bell]. The resulting SERPs were not what I expected – I had expected the Canadian Taco Bell site (www.tacobell.ca) to come up #1. Instead, this is what I saw:

Um, what? What’s with all the US sites there? The result I actually wanted was quite far down the page.

Some notes: This search was done on Google.com, via a search bookmark. While normally all Google.com searches punt me back to Google.ca, somehow when I search like this it stays on Google.com. However, it usually recognizes me as being in Canada and gives me those SERPs or some mashup of .com and .ca SERPs. But I was logged in, so they should know I’m Canadian/click on Canadian sites/whatever (although I was previously searching for hotels in Burlington VT, so maybe I confused them). I suspect this query might also have triggered QDF due to all the chatter about the lawsuit at the moment — and thus the inclusion of News — however, to be sure I’ll have to remember to do this search again when things are quieter.

For comparison, here is the SERPs I expected, which I got through actually searching on Google.ca: