Online Reputation Management, SEO, Web Development
Google Places Search Update (The Halloween Nightmare)
By | Published: October 29, 2010
For those of us watching Google closely, we’ve seen them experiment with the local search changes for the past several months. Google has said that more than 20% of searches are local, so it only makes sense that the SERPs will reflect that change. Google made their official announcement of the change on October 27th, and it’s definitely a good read for a quick overview.
It’ll take a few weeks (or longer) to sort through the SEO implications of these changes. Previously the map “7 pack” listings were different than the organic listings both in location and the rules behind where the results showed up. It was possible to game the map listings without too much difficulty while much of the competition was over organic search. With this update the map listings are integrated into the SERPs showing between 10 and 14 results on page 1. We will need to understand how these new map listings are computed and what changes have been made to the underlying algorithms. We’ve been told by Google that “…the local and general search algorithms … have been consolidated.” and that “…there should be no more local results and no fewer web results…” which means it should be a good thing (and help weed out spammers). However in practice we are seeing different data in some cases.
Over here the bigger change outside of the Place update is the ranking algorithm changes that have been largely overlooked. Preceeding this change by a few days was a failure of the indexing service by Google on October 22. This hiccup caused new pages not to be indexed and old pages not to reflect ranking updates. Whispers on the street are that the changes are hurting WordPress sites as well as sites that have poor quality content.
I can say our current clients have been stable in their rankings. However, sites we are working to get ranked have not budged in a week. Unfortunately Google isn’t generally very forthcoming with the type of information we need and we have to ferret it out ourselves. Regardless, this is fun stuff and while it can be frustrating for those in a hurry, we LOVE it!
Google Places Search Update (The Halloween Nightmare)
For those of us watching Google closely, we’ve seen them experiment with the local search changes for the past several months. Google has said that more than 20% of searches are local, so it only makes sense that the SERPs will reflect that change. Google made their official announcement of the change on October 27th, and it’s definitely a good read for a quick overview.
It’ll take a few weeks (or longer) to sort through the SEO implications of these changes. Previously the map “7 pack” listings were different than the organic listings both in location and the rules behind where the results showed up. It was possible to game the map listings without too much difficulty while much of the competition was over organic search. With this update the map listings are integrated into the SERPs showing between 10 and 14 results on page 1. We will need to understand how these new map listings are computed and what changes have been made to the underlying algorithms. We’ve been told by Google that “…the local and general search algorithms … have been consolidated.” and that “…there should be no more local results and no fewer web results…” which means it should be a good thing (and help weed out spammers). However in practice we are seeing different data in some cases.
Over here the bigger change outside of the Place update is the ranking algorithm changes that have been largely overlooked. Preceeding this change by a few days was a failure of the indexing service by Google on October 22. This hiccup caused new pages not to be indexed and old pages not to reflect ranking updates. Whispers on the street are that the changes are hurting WordPress sites as well as sites that have poor quality content.
I can say our current clients have been stable in their rankings. However, sites we are working to get ranked have not budged in a week. Unfortunately Google isn’t generally very forthcoming with the type of information we need and we have to ferret it out ourselves. Regardless, this is fun stuff and while it can be frustrating for those in a hurry, we LOVE it!