Google Places/Points of Interest Rankings?
-
Does anyone have an idea on how Google ranks or determines the 'Points of Interests' that come up when searching about places/cities?
-
Hi, this info I pulled out from Google Support,
Hope it helps:
Ranking of Google Places listings
Google Maps search results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence. These factors are combined to help us find the best match for your search. For example, our search technology might decide that a business that's farther away from your location is more likely to have what you're looking for than a business that's closer. Here's more detail on what relevance, distance, and prominence mean:
Relevance: Relevance is how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for. A complete and detailed listing in Places can help us better understand your business and match you to relevant search results.
Distance: Just like it sounds -- how far is each potential search result from the location term used in a search? If you don't specify a location in your search, we'll calculate distance based on what we know about your location.
Prominence: This describes how well-known or prominent a listing can be. This is based on information we have about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and we try to reflect this online as well. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels, or well-known store brands that are familiar to many people are also likely to be more prominent in search results.
Google Maps and Google Places are free services, so there's no way to request or pay for a better ranking. In addition, we do our best to keep the details of the algorithm confidential in order to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.
Thanks,
Russel
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
PDFs With No Index Contribute To Page Ranks?
I have a question I'm hoping you can help me with. If I upload a PDF and add a no index under the meta robots index so that the PDF doesn't appear in search results when I send people the link to this PDF, does it still contribute to my site traffic/ranking etc? Basically we are deciding whether to put some PDFs with pricing options etc onto our website or on a google drive. We will be sending the links to potential clients. If visitors clicking on the link would still help with increasing traffic and increasing our google rank (without that PDF showing in results) we thought this might be the best solution.
Algorithm Updates | | whiterabbitnz0 -
Google Local Algorithm Changes?
I was wondering if you have heard about any Google Local algorithm changes. We have about 200 franchise locations. Some of our locations have dropped significantly over the past few weeks. Locations that were showing up in the 1-3 positions are now no longer showing on the first page. This is for very relevant phrases for our main line of business (which is also in our business name)... ‘Phrase, CITY NAME’. These locations have plenty of positive Google reviews. We would typically rank well for a phrase like that based on our relevance. I did some brainstorming. Do you think any of these could have any impact? Google is all about things looking and feeling natural including link building, etc. We have used Yext which made a lot of changes across the web to fix addresses, etc. Do you think Google may be seeing this as unnatural? Too many changes at to many sites in to short a period of time? Along those same lines, do you think Google may be penalizing some of our franchise pages for being to ‘perfect’? It would be ‘natural’ for addresses to have some difference across the web and a bit unnatural to have them all match so perfectly. I know that Google has always stated the business name should be listed in Google Local the way it is listed to the general public. Things such as “Business Name Boston” should be listed as “Business Name”. Each of our franchise locations is named in house to reflect their geo location..... "Business Name Boston", "Business Name St. Louis". Many of our competitors also use the practice of attaching geo terms as well. Do you think we may be getting hit with a penalty now even though we have listed things on Google with the Geo term for years.... and is how WE refer to each location? Is it possible that by working with Yext, we drew attention to this practice? Should we remove our local listings geo term on Google Local? How about across the web? We are in a business that does not require customers to come to our location. Some of our locations have not suppressed the address in their local listings while others have. Many of our competitors have not. Do you think this could play into it? Some of our locations that are not showing in Local have good organic results. Have you heard anything about Google dropping Local if they show in organic? I know Google has been looking at social media more and more and I believe they will continue to do so. If our local pages have no social presence, could this adversely affect things? (I think this is probably not the case…. but wanted to throw it out there) I have noticed that in some cases where Local has dropped, we have multiple offices in that metro area. Is it possible that this could affect things? Have you heard of any Local algorithm changes? I know they are releasing a new dashboard sporadically, could this be in conjunction with a larger Local algorithm change? Our CMS tool does not allow us to change Title/Meta per page (I know... terrible!!). So every page has the same title and same meta description. (We are changing our CMS system! Can't wait!). Could this play into it? Thanks for any feedback!
Algorithm Updates | | MABES1 -
Can a google data refresh knock your pages out of the rankings?
I see that around mid November 2013 a handful of my sites pages dropped off of Google completely. It was around the data refreshes in November, and while everyone says it doesn't effect that much I was wondering if anyone knew if it could knock some of my pages out of the rankings for a specific keyword. Note - we had previously held muliple listings for different pages on our site for this particular keyword. Google kept the highest ranking and knocked the lower ones off. See attached image of our keyword ranking history to see what I mean. DcJJM0M
Algorithm Updates | | franchisesolutions0 -
Does anyone know if Google ranks a responsive site, or a specific mobile site higher than each other?
I have heard that Google favors specific .m sites overs responsive designs in it's rankings. Does anyone know if this is true? And, if there is any supporting information. I have been in contact with our account team at Google but haven't had a response on this as yet. I appreciate any help on this. Cheers!
Algorithm Updates | | Fasthosts0 -
Has there been a change in the Bing/Yahoo Algorithm?
I have noticed many of my sites took a beating this month on Bing and Yahoo, while Google stayed pretty flat.
Algorithm Updates | | netviper0 -
Does google have the worst site usability?
Google tells us to make our sites better for our readers, which we are doing, but do you think google has horrible site usabilty? For example, in webmaster tools, I'm always being confused by their changes and the way they just drop things. In the HTML suggestions area, they don't tell you when the data was last updated, so the only way to tell is to download the files and check. In the URL removals, they used to show you the URLs they had removed. Now that is gone and the only way you can check is to try adding one. We don't have any URL parameters, so any parameters are as a result of some other site tacking on stuff at the end of our URL and there is no way to tell them that we don't have any parameters, so ignore them all. Also, they add new parameters they find on the end of the list, so the only way to check is to click through to the end of the list.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Why Google Cache is not showing ?
Hello Everyone, I have a question for you. Today when I checked cache:www.bollywoodshaadis.com on Google.com, it is showing following message. 404. <ins>That’s an error.</ins> The requested URL /search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=519&q=cache%3Awww.bollywoodshaadis.com&oq=cache%3Awww.bollywoodshaadis.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=2501l16050l0l16394l30l30l0l23l0l0l353l1781l0.1.4.2l7l0 was not found on this server. I was able to see sitelinks till yesterday but they also have disappeared now. Can someone please tell me why is this happening? Is this a temporary issue? or something needs to be done.
Algorithm Updates | | SEOcandy0 -
Google Directory vs DMOZ
What is the difference between the Google Directory and the DMOZ if any?
Algorithm Updates | | BrandonC-2698870