Google place listings and search results- quick question.
-
Has anybody else noticed that they are ranking better on 'places' yet they have dropped off in the actual search results? We've had no message through webmaster tools. The same seems to have happened to our competitors.
-
Hi Onlinchester,
You are not the only one. I noticed it too. Only in certain group of keywords, and always if there is a local result.
So it is not the Panda update I think (fortunatelly... or not...)
I also found this article from an agency that noticed the same: http://www.1stonthelist.ca/articles/are-your-organic-listings-being-replaced-with-local-listings/
For now, the CTR in local seems to be better for local than in organic, but I'm surprised. We will see..
-
Hi Onlinechester,
I believe what you are describing is the quite common phenomenon in which the previous organic rank of a business for a given query is subsumed into a newer local ranking (a ranking in the pack of lettered, pinned results). Since the Venice update in early 2012, it has become uncommon for any single business to have both a local and organic page 1 ranking for any search term. There are exceptions to this, but as a rule, if you've got a local listing, you're unlikely to have a secondary organic one on the same page of the SERPs.
Some marketers have published pieces on managing to achieve a double page 1 ranking for local clients. Here's an article on that topic by Adam Steele:
http://www.nightlitemedia.com/2012/05/organic-and-google-places-ranking-on-page-1/
There's also a good discussion going on about this topic at The Local Search Forum:
I recommend you read both resources and see if what I've written is accurately describing the common phenomenon you are experiencing.
If not, please come back with further details.
-
We tend to agree with Moosa, "local results" and "organic results" are not linked in anyway. If your local results seem to have fallen off quite a bit, I'd suggest taking a look at your link building activities.
Also run your competitors through opensiteexplorer.com or ahrefs.com, see what they're doing from a link buliding perspective that might have caused them to jump over you.
-
I personally don’t think that ranking better in places and drop off in normal SERPs have any interaction but this can be the result of latest Panda update (24<sup>th</sup>) which might affect your niche... I don’t think this is the point of problem... all you have to do is to analyse your website again from SEO perspective and build some links if required.
This kind of thing happen from time to time and the idea is to check your SEO campaigns and fix the problems and you will see a re-gain in SERPs from the desired key phrases
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
-
I have made my new website live. But while checking in Google it is not showing in search result ( site: www.oomfr.com ). Can anybody please advice.
Hi Team, I have made my new website live. But while checking in Google it is not showing in search result ( site: www.oomfr.com ). Can anybody please advice.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Google still listing pages from old domain after 2 change requests
Good Morning I put forward the following question in December 2014 https://moz.com/community/q/google-still-listing-old-domain as pages from our old domain www.fhr-net.co.uk were still indexed in Google. We have submitted two change request in WMT, the most recent was over 6 months ago yet the old pages are still being indexed and we can't see why that would be Any advice would be appreciated
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Google not indexing /showing my site in search results...
Hi there, I know there are answers all over the web to this type of question (and in Webmaster tools) however, I think I have a specific problem that I can't really find an answer to online. site is: www.lizlinkleter.com Firstly, the site has been live for over 2 weeks... I have done everything from adding analytics, to submitting a sitemap, to adding to webmaster tools, to fetching each individual page as googlebot and then submitting to index via webmaster tools. I've checked my robot files and code elsewhere on the site and the site is not blocking search engines (as far as I can see) There are no security issues in webmaster tools or MOZ. Google says it has indexed 31 pages in the 'Index Status' section, but on the site dashboard it says only 2 URLS are indexed. When I do a site:www.lizlinketer.com search the only results I get are pages that are excluded in the robots file: /xmlrpc.php & /admin-ajax.php. Now, here's where I think the issue stems from - I developed the site myself for my wife and I am new to doing this, so I developed it on the live URL (I now know this was silly) - I did block the content from search engines and have the site passworded, but I think Google must have crawled the site before I did this - the issue with this was that I had pulled in the Wordpress theme's dummy content to make the site easier to build - so lots of nasty dupe content. The site took me a couple of months to construct (working on it on and off) and I eventually pushed it live and submitted to Analytics and webmaster tools (obviously it was all original content at this stage)... But this is where I made another mistake - I submitted an old site map that had quite a few old dummy content URLs in there... I corrected this almost immediately, but it probably did not look good to Google... My guess is that Google is punishing me for having the dummy content on the site when it first went live - fair enough - I was stupid - but how can I get it to index the real site?! My question is, with no tech issues to clear up (I can't resubmit site through webmaster tools) how can I get Google to take notice of the site and have it show up in search results? Your help would be massively appreciated! Regards, Fraser
Technical SEO | | valdarama0 -
Has Google Stopped Listing URLs with Crawl Errors in Webmaster Tools?
I went to Google Webmaster Tools this morning and found that one of my clients had 11 crawl errors. However, Webmaster Tools is not showing which URLs are having experiencing the errors, which it used to do. (I checked several other clients that I manage and they list crawl errors without showing the specific URLs. Does anyone know how I can find out which URLs are experiencing problems? (I checked with Bing Webmaster Tools and the number of errors are different).
Technical SEO | | TopFloor0 -
How to handle (internal) search result pages?
Hi Mozers, I'm not quite sure what the best way is to handle internal search pages. In this case it's for an ecommerce website with about 8.000+ products and search pages currently look like: example.com/search.php?search=QUERY+HERE. I'm leaning towards making them follow, noindex. Since pages like this can be easily abused for duplicate content and because I'd rather have the category pages ranked. How would you handle this?
Technical SEO | | Qon0 -
Google places page where is my additional information
Hi When creating Google places you can add additional information but where does this information go? its not showing up on the page when you place page? Whats the best practice when creating pages in relation to optimising them ? thanks
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Google Off/On Tags
I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan1 -
Google Places Citations - How Long to Aggregate?
Hi, On Google Places we have clients that have bad data (incorrect name, address, #) on aggregated sites (citysearch, merchantcircle, yelp) which prevents those sites from pulling into the Google Places accounts. We've been manually correcting listings for a while and many times it still hasn't pulled into the Google Places listings for months on end despite the data matching. What are your experiences with correcting aggregated Google Places data, how long has it taken for this data to pull into your places accounts?
Technical SEO | | qlkasdjfw0