Google Moves In On Local Search

The SEO world is all atwitter about three moves that Google has made in the last week; these are all extensions to what has already been implemented by adding Video, Press Releases, and Maps to Universal search. All three of these new additions have implications for search results and they will likely add to the tasks needed to get and keep a high ranking.

First was the addition of Place Pages

Google Blog announcement

Google described these as “a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it.” An ambitious goal like that is something to pay attention to!

Google stated that they would not be indexing Place Pages. Local Search guru Andrew Shotland reported that there is no crawlable architecture – at least not yet. Goggle is blocking the googlebot in it’s robots.txt file on Place Pages.

That does not stop people (and SEO’s) from linking to Place Pages, so they will rank in short order.

When the 10 pack Map (Google Local Business Center) were introduced the result was less traffic for directories and Internet Yellow Pages. With Place Pages arrival, an easy prediction to make is that over time at least one out of the remaining top ten search results for a local business name will be a Google Place Page.

Ultimately, one or more sites per local search could lose the page one position they have. If Google changes Place Pages to include a local category or tag pages, that result will be multiplied. For More – check out this from Andrew Shotland

Second was SideWiki

Google Sidewiki is a new feature of the Google Toolbar that lets you leave comments about and on any website. When someone is using Sidewiki and views that page, they’ll see your comments. It’s “pages” are indexed.

Sidewiki is available for Firefox and IE, coming soon to Chrome and other browsers. This is a powerful tool that lets people add information to websites. Google promotes it as a way to “Help and learn from others as you browse the web”.

You have to login with your Gmail account ID so hopefully that is a caution to people who might normally use anonymity to spout off. Is there a moderator?

According to Google “…instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed”.

In Google’s view Sidewiki will add rich, relevant info to websites, sort of a distributed version of Wikipedia. However, Sidewiki could also be rife with advertising, spam, scams and worse. Google will attempt to control this with algorithms, but some inappropriate comments will still slip through.

For an extensive article including excerpts from Google’s engineers, Check out this SearchEngineLand article.

Third: Google trends in Google universal search results (in US and Japan)

Google has begun adding real-time search data to search engine result pages.

Google has put “Hot Trends” information within Google’s regular search results. People searching on topics that are popular that day (in the top 100) will see “Hot Trends” data near the bottom of the search results page and just above the related search area.

Clicks on the link allow users to explore the topic with top news items, blog posts and web results listed. This is a limited response to the popularity of Twitter.

Twitter has news of breaking events and reports of interesting activities, often available well before the broadcast media or bloggers. It is fast becoming a constantly-updated info stream posted by users on a by-second basis, from all over the world. Many are using Twitter as a real time search engine to reveal useful, timely breaking news and observations. Some have described it as a view into the conversation happening inside customers heads.

Google Trends potentially reduces the search result real estate for websites; however so far the impact is minimal.