Google Integrates ‘local results’ Above Organic!
I sat down at my desk this morning and booted up my pc, and conducted the usual routine of checking a few search terms while my other programs loaded up and I was hit with something quite strange. It seems that Google has integrated ‘local’ results above the organic listing when you search for a service in any location. A search for hotels in Manchester produces:
After google’s algorithm update last week, this is a major step forward in search - meaning that actual businesses will be returned before the organic listings, This will have repurcussions particularly in the travel industry, as it will make it more difficult for brokers and consolidators to rank highly for location specific searches, as they don’t physically have a hotel/car rental depot etc in that location. Also significantly, on an average monitor, a search for ‘hotels in manchester for example will now only return 1 organic result above the fold! Another concern is that it takes the focus away from the adwords ads whicch may have a small impact on Google’s own revenue. This undoubtedly presents a relevant experience for users, (as long as they can keep the local results ‘clean’) - but this will reignite the debate about Google’s motives. If people use Google to navigate the web, do they really want ‘Yellow Pages’ type results?  I’m very interested to know what people think about this, will it stay? Will it work? And more importantly, how long before people find out how to spam these results? Is this the start of the end for SEO? Want more reading, try the offical blog here.
morleymouse said
am January 30 2007 @ 11:39 am
At the moment it only seems to cover a small selection of UK cities. I also doubt that they will be taking on anything European anytime soon - mostly because their maps deteriorate quickly as you head towards Spain, Germany, France etc
Also something to note if you do a search for “hotels in leeds” the second result by the map is actually an affiliate website: http://www.artfullodger-leeds.co.uk/content.php?categoryId=716
Alongside the hotel information there are Active Hotel reservation links (granted there badly formed but affiliate links all the same).
pete said
am January 30 2007 @ 12:48 pm
Interesting point regarding the affiliate sites in maps, I’ve had a look around and can’t actually find out what the criteria is for adding your srvice at a given location, you seem to be able to just upload anything via Base. Can’t find any criteria or guidelines or info as to how these results are ranked which is going to be important now that they ar ein the first page in the serps (being top of the local results is going to give you a higher position than being top of the natural serps for alot of phrases now) - I expect to see the spam surfacing within the next couple of weeks.
On the European note, a search for Car hire Berlin brings back the ‘local’ box, however for smaller cities/towns it doesn’t. I would think that when people in the UK search for car hire in berlin, they are more likely to be looking for UK companies to book with - so returning German companies local to Berlin isn’t offering the most relevant results. This brings the question of trying to determine what people are actually looking for rather than what they type which is a whole other debate!