The Local Search Results Page See’s Dramatic Changes with Places Search!

Wow, Google completely changed the local search game yet again. This should really come as no surprise to those who follow Google closely. My earlier blog post spoke about the importance of not putting all your eggs into one basket when it comes to Google places. So many businesses have been neglecting to optimize their natural organic rankings, instead placing a total emphasis on only optimizing their Google Places listing. In the local search world we call this “mapism”. This is going to come as a complete shock to many who have been benefiting from first page exposure do to their local listing, as well as a those those who relied on Pay per Click for first page traffic.

This full scale change by Google effectively puts an end to “mapism”. Those local businesses who only optimized to get into the 7 pack have to change tactics. Now, the local and general search algorithms have been combined (now called Places Search or Places Mode ) to generate listings based on results from both.

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Where did all my links go?

There are widespread reports from many webmasters that Yahoo! Site Explorer has recently lost or at least stoped displaying a vast quantity of the backlinks reported by the tool.

Many have been surmising that this is the first step toward the Yahoo!/Bing full scale integration of search data.

But according to Search Engine Land, the data that’s missing now is unrelated to the Yahoo/Bing integration. Yahoo! reps said, “Yahoo! is investigating this report and will work to resolve it quickly if an issue is found, however it is unrelated to the longer term question we previously addressed regarding future support for backlinks.” Yahoo! reiterated that the long-term plan is to continue to provide external link data via Site Explorer.
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This week Google released a statement highlighting their estimates of the companies’ economic impact on local businesses across the United States. The report highlights how Google has literally transformed the traditional marketing landscape and helped many small business entrepreneurs grow their companies in this period of economic recovery.

The report is filled with stories of small business owners who have utilized Google’s Marketing resources and how this technology has had a direct impact on their business. “In a time of tighter budgets and a slow economic recovery, we’re glad to support so many small businesses and entrepreneurs across the country by helping them find new customers more efficiently and monetize their websites through targeted advertising,” says Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales.

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