Category: Google+ Local

I was having an interesting conversation with an agency client this weekend about why mobile traffic had been flat/down to their retailer clients’ location pages since the end of 2015. My initial response touched on part of the answer: “I suspect they are experiencing a change in traffic to their site as a result of the anchoring of the Local 3-pack in SERPs that occurred in Fall 2015. Here’s a post I did on this phenomenon at the time:

We have been seeing a lot of mismatched locations in the local packs lately but this one takes the cake, er curry…: (Click to enlarge)   You know you can’t beat Nayana Eye Care in Pradesh. They’re “recognized by the Food Corporation of India” and have “world-class sterility.”

Last week, Google started to switch out its local Carousel results for a new set of mobilish-type pack results that appear to rely heavily on its local Knowledge Panels, so let’s call it a Knowledge Pack, or “K-Pack”, for the purposes of this post. In his seminal post Some Thoughts On The New Pak Results From Google, Professor Blumenthal mused: “I would love to hear what happens to web traffic for the directory type sites that seemed to be doing…

On March 15th, the WP Total Cache plugin on this site for some reason started serving Googlebot 403 response codes (aka “Access Denied”): As you can see organic entrances to my site via the home page have tanked over the past couple of days: While traffic to other pages was down about 20% on Monday, it hasn’t totally cratered probably because Googlebot hasn’t crawled most of the other pages yet and hit the 403s. One of the more interesting results…

UPDATE: Some of my better-read compatriots have pointed me towards Greg Sterling’s article from April about how Google is using the layout below to appease anti-competition complaints in Europe.  So take my theories below as pure entertainment, as it should be. Nick Rink of Smart Local , a UK Local SEO firm, posted a screenshot of this new Google Local SERP this morning on Google+:   I can’t find another example of this, or a full SERP screenshot, but I…

In my SEL post 7 Things I Have Figured Out About The New Google Maps, I mentioned that businesses might want to try using ALL CAPS in their business name on their Google Places + Local (whateva) profile as I had noticed EXTREME PIZZA rocking the all-caps in the map result I was studying: A commenter then added: We quickly updated the post to warn readers that all caps in a business name might not be a good idea.  In…

Based on the comments I am seeing on yesterday’s post, it appears that the new Google+ Local Reviews Pop-Up has gone global. Since it seems like this is a real thing and not a test, I started looking at it a bit more to figure out the implications. One question that popped up: @localseoguide What do you think this means for the value of Google+ Local pages that aren’t receiving heavy reviews??? — Jason A. Keeler (@jkeys1313) July 31, 2013…

Danny Sullivan just tweeted that Google is screwing up royally when it comes to searches for “dana point jet ski”: Good job, Google. You ignore HTML title tag, make up your own title instead. Result: misname a harbor as business twitter.com/dannysullivan/… — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 30, 2013 I thought it would be interesting to see if we can figure out why this is happening and whose screw-up it really is.  Here are some of the smoking guns: Dana Point…

I always get them confused… Now that Marissa Mayer is taking the helm at Yahoo!, I wonder if this means Yahoo Local is going to get some much-needed attention. A few years ago, an insider told me that Yahoo Local got nine million daily visits just from Google. That number has almost certainly declined, but I’ve got to believe the service still gets substantial traffic from search engines, third party sites and Yahoo properties. There’s so much potential there and…

This past February, in  The Non-Place-Place Use Case I posted about how Google was delisting businesses that did not service customers at their locations but had not requested their addresses be hidden on Google Maps.  Mike, Miriam and others chimed in on how lame this was.   Today, I got this email about this “recent” update: Guess they were busy with the Glasses thing…