Not sure if GOOG is manually deindexing Google Place Pages or if this is just the algorithm at work – often new pages rank well and then disappear for a few days – but some of the Place Pages I referenced in yesterday’s post on Google Place Pages SEO are now gone:
The Place Page for Zurich Hauptbahnof was on page one this morning but now it’s not in the top 100.
Several Place Pages showed up for this query but now none do.
Still seeing a Place Page on page one for Burdick Chocolate Cafe Boston though.
It is possible that GOOG is responding to the plethora of articles that have come out over the past 72 hours speculating that Place Pages is the beginning of the end of life on the planet as we know it, but then again it’s probably just the algorithm.
And how you feel about that depends on whether you think life is more Matrix or more Terminator.
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See the Update here – http://searchengineland.com/google-places-pages-now-showing-in-search-26636
There were lots of links to Google Place Pages appearing in search results earlier on. However, following the viral speculation against the same, Google has taken steps to remove these links and has added a “Disallow: /places/” tag to the robots.txt for Google maps.
The Burdick Chocolate Cafe Boston Place Page is still visible because it has been mentioned and heavily promoted by Google as an example for Place Pages and may bloggers have linked to it.
The disallow was in place at launch I believe
It’s speculation on my part, but I think Google could offer to automatically optimize these pages for businesses. The design of the pages lend themselves to automatic optimization and Google certainly has the scale and expertise to do something like this. If that’s their plan, it could be very significant indeed.Great post.
Hi Andrew.
It seems Google is now starting a Local Business Listing Ad program (see here: http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=148046). Flat monthly fee, no bidding, appearing on Google.com and Google Maps.
Dunno if this is linked to Place Pages but looks pretty coincidental, don’t you think?