Has anyone else seen a Google Plus Local listing displace a regular search listing?
-
I have a particular site that I have been working on for about eight months and had the site on Page 1 of Google search results for eight keywords (they are fairly small local-based keywords, so I'm really not trying to boast). Perhaps six weeks ago for two of the keywords we popped into the #2 position for Google Plus Local results. When this happened the site completely disappeared from the regular search results. A couple weeks later, the Google Plus Local listing was gone, and the site was back on Page 1 in the regular listings. This has gone back and forth several times, with either a very high Local result or a very high regular search result, but only one at a time.
I suppose it would make sense for the same site to only be able to have one position on the front page at any given time, but my searches for info on this have been entirely fruitless.
Has anyone else seen anything like this or have any thoughts?
Cheers.
-
Hi Ian,
Yes, what you are experiencing is well-documented. What is happening is that your previous organic rank has been subsumed into your new blended local rank, which takes your on-page/off-page SEO factors into account in addition to other factors like your Google+ profile, citations, reviews etc. So, you haven't 'lost' your organic ranking exactly...it's gone into the mix in creating your local ranking.
In the past, it was very common for powerful businesses to dominate the first page of the SERPs with multiple listings. For example, as single business might be able to achieve a local listing, one or more organic listings, plus directory listings of his business and even image and video listings all on page 1 of the results.
Around the time of the Venice Update (see: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update), this type of dominance changed. Google began showing a greater variety of businesses in the results, and the instance of multiple listings for a single business became quite rare.
Now, some months ago, some articles were published by some excellent Local SEOs who had managed to achieve double listing for clients by using a tactic of optimizing a second page on their site in certain ways. Here are some examples of this:
http://www.nightlitemedia.com/2012/05/organic-and-google-places-ranking-on-page-1/
However, there has been some talk that this tactic isn't working the way it was a couple of months ago.
Also on this topic, past heatmap studies have shown that it's better to have the blended local listing than the organic one:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eyetracking-google-serps
However, recently, I have bumped into conversations in which people are stating that their businesses' CTR rate went down after they were transition from an organic listing to a blended local one, opening discussion as to whether it's really better to achieve high local inclusion if it means losing your previous organic listing.. I don't have a source to quote on that. It's just rumblings I've heard.
So, as you can see, there is a lot of discussion going on about this, and you are not alone in what you're experiencing with your listing. Hope these thoughts and resources help!
-
This has happened to me as well so I am eagerly awaiting a response from someone with knowledge of this.
Currently I have been bumped off Google Plus Local and back on the organic listings. Two weeks ago it was the opposite. At one point a few months back I had them both ranked well in Plus and Organic.
Drives me crazy
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
-
Google Indexing
Hi We have roughly 8500 pages in our website. Google had indexed almost 6000 of them, but now suddenly I see that the pages indexed has gone to 45. Any possible explanations why this might be happening and what can be done for it. Thanks, Priyam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kh-priyam0 -
Should I have home listings not followed?
Hi, I currently am doing digital marketing for a home builder. Here is one of our challenges: we build homes, create the page to sell them, details on the house are put up, Google crawls them, and then the house sells and I need to take it off the site. This is just creating a constant redirect process that I'm OK with but I'm just thinking I'd rather have Google not know they exist and delete them. I have community pages and floor plan pages with evergreen content and a blog that's doing well. I'm OK with Google not seeing these pages, but I'd really like to know what others in the industry do and what Moz thinks is best. I have a working theory of creating 10-15 pages where I rotate the houses: house 1 is posted and once it sells replace site content with house 16 (assuming 15 pages already exist with 15 houses). Reason - none of my listing pages have any page authority and it overall just makes the site un-authoritative. I know the domain authority is a different ranking factor, but I need the pages to be stronger or just not there. I'd love confirmation that that shouldn't be a concern for me as it seems to be one that I've inherited through years of SEO marketing paranoia.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AvexHomes2 -
How Can I Displace a Quora Q&A in a Google Featured Snippet?
Hello all. I'm looking for ideas for displacing a Quora Q&A as the featured snippet in google search results. I rank organically for the target term (it's a branded term, "urban airship pricing") in results 1, 2, 3 and 4. The Quora Q&A ranks 5, but is still getting the featured snippet. The Quora question, which is from 2013, is negative - essentially "why does Urban Airship cost so much." It was posed / someone answered the question before we restructured pricing, and added a free starter edition, so the information in the answer is incorrect. It's causing issues for our sales teams, there's a fair amount of volume around this term for us, and worst of all, it's making me mad 😉 I've considered the tactics listed below, but would love to know if anyone's done this, and what free or low-lost tactics work/where to focus efforts. Thanks in advance for help! -Jessica Tactics I'm Considering (Are some or all worth doing? Better ideas?) Create a pricing FAQ page on my website to try give Google a short answer to a query related to pricing that it might feature instead of the Quora Q&A Get a lot of folks to downvote the Quora question (and upvote the short answer we added). Although I'm worried that "activity" on the question might actually make things worse not better in terms of its visibility. Buy paid Google Adwords for the term so the featured snippet isn't quite so starkly featured (we were buying for this term, looking into why our ads aren't showing up at the moment) Talk about pricing on sites like Product Hunt or others (other ideas?) to see if they'll rank highly enough to add more/better content to page 1 results. Contact Quora and let them know that this outdated question is being pulled into a featured snippet and see if they'll do something about it (remove it, etc.) Provide feedback to Google (using the link under the snippet) that "something is wrong" or "this isn't useful"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpoundstone0 -
Google Indexing our site
We have 700 city pages on our site. We submitted to google via a https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/locations.xml but they only indexed 15 so far. Yes the content is similar on all of the pages...thought on getting them to index the remaining pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Search box within search results question
I work for a Theater news website. We have two sister sites, theatermania.com in the US and whatsonstage.com in London. Both sites have largely the same codebase and page layouts. We've implemented markup that allows google to show a search box for our site in its results page. For some reason, the search box is showing for one site but not the other: http://screencast.com/t/CSA62NT8 We're scratching our heads. Does anyone have any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
How can I get a list of every url of a site in Google's index?
I work on a site that has almost 20,000 urls in its site map. Google WMT claims 28,000 indexed and a search on Google shows 33,000. I'd like to find what the difference is. Is there a way to get an excel sheet with every url Google has indexed for a site? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Top Google News Result = Search Result #11 (first on second page)
Hey all, I've noticed that, in most cases, when we have an article that gets the top spot in Google News results for a given keyword, the search result for that same article will appear in position #11 (the first result on the second page for standard SERP viewing). This is nearly always the case, which suggests its built into Google's algorithm to prevent overlap. Has anyone else experienced this? I haven't seen it discussed previously on Moz or other SEO forums, but it makes sense. Or if you haven't experienced this, I'd love to hear about what you're seeing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dangaul0 -
How to position in local Google
Hello, It's been easy for me to jump in .com - English only results. But, regional google is making me problems. How to position there? What are the top 3 key elements for ranking locally that don't matter much internationally? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DaBomb110