Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

Why Local Google Places Matter to Your Business

Image by abraham.williams via Flickr

• 73% of all online activity is related to local content (Google)
• 82% of local searchers follow up with a phone call or show up on your doorstep (TMP/comScore)
• 66% of Americans use local search to find local businesses (comScore)

 

Is Google a well oiled spin machine?

Is Google a well oiled spin machine? Much like a White House Press Secretary they put out the message as they want it said. Yes they have their own Karl Roves and James Carville types.

A recent article at the official Google Blog illustrates the disconnect of a beheamoth trying to spread the word.

The author here says that Google is about their algo :

"Does Google manually edit its results?" (The Answer):Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity. The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages. I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).

Um what? I thought there was a team of overseas Politburo that went thru all our websites looking for quality (whatever that means). Or is that propogandist hype meant to keep the weobple in line? Also ,is this the geek version of the "wisdom of crowds"? Some would argue that crowds are in fact not very smart. Others can argue the "voice of the people are the voice of god".

Think about it. Google hires genuises to do their work. Having to resort to manual checkups is an insult to their intellectual superiority complex.

Always question the logic of the spin vs. the reality. You will find that in the end it all makes pretty simple sense.

The complexity is made by those looking to sell the newest SEO manual. And by Google looking to find an even bigger profit.

Adwords Wins!

I found this somewhat daring. Google is claiming that Obama and McCain won because of their Adword spends. Google's Greenberger who was in charge of getting the campaigns to buy ads with Google claims that Hillary lost because of her sporadic spending.

This fuzzy logic works well in sales, but I am pretty sure that the Google Algo works a little bit more logically than this claim.

We think it's not a coincidence that the two savviest primary campaigns with Google are the winning ones.

Except I think there is a lesson that even though on one side the candidate was almost counted out and he kept pushing. Whether he won because of Adwords though, and not a larger combined mix of marketing is debatable.

Is Google Really Helping You With Free Tools?

Google offers a plethora of great tools for Webmasters. But why?

Data

Many of us webmasters love Google's "help", while others see their tools as an unwelcome intrusion. More specifically, an unwelcome look into your website's inner workings and your users behavior. Some skeptics even go so far as to call these tools "spyware".

Google Goes Black

Page Rank is Dead

Page Rank

Well there has been a flurry of blog activity complaining of Google's draconian "slap" of prominent sites such as the SFGate, CopyBlogger, Washington Post, Forbes & many many more. As Page Rank levels have dropped 1 or in some cases 2 levels.

Now Page Rank is the relative importance of a Page and was really what launched Google. Link popularity was nothing new as it was a prime part of the Inktomi Technology that Yahoo owned, but Larry Page took it a step further.

How Does Google Work?

Portfolio.com has a nice interactive time line on the evolution of Google from Search to Adwords to YouTube.

But they also have a terrific schematic of how Google works once you make a query.

From the query to the results page. To the un-initiated you will find this quite illuminating as you will learn how a search results page is made up and that it comes from a plethora of sources.

Supplemental Result Finder

The Makers of IBP have listed in their recent newsletter a new way to see if your web pages are listed in the dreaded Google Supplemental Results.

Simply query into Google the following:

site:http://www.yoururl.com/&

I thought I saw actual results this AM. However, now when querying, I do not see the typical supplemental ID next to the link.

It had been rumored that Google was considering removing that ability to find your supplemental results. Maybe it has happened. Hmmm, I wonder why they would do such a thing? <insert sarcasm here>

Who's Stealing My Content?

I recently went to the web and was flabergasted to find my content on another website.

The nerve.  Hell, its not an insult, its a damned crime. That's what it is. But what can I do about it?

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:228HtfRRgVQJ:houseblogger.typepad.com/+real+estate+blog&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Yep, there is Houseblogger totally housed on this other website.

Okay, I mention this only tongue in cheek to contrast a recent post about what is an ethical issue, perhaps a legal issue, and a marketing issue.

Now, we all know that Google and the other engines crawl/scrape our pages and sites to list them in the search engine index. That makes us happy, and is a large source of my clients and my income.

However, a recent post by the Phoenix Real Estate Guy about a splog (spam blog) post made me pause and reflect. The gist of his post was that a site scraped several posts off the Phoenix site and listed it on their site as a post. This is very common. However, other than the name itself, their was no link back to the Phoenix site.

Now, I started off bashing Google as doing the same thing to create a contrast. This is the inherant challenge with the web. Just like drug addicts,we are cool that the engines copy and do what they will with our sites.

Webmasters trade not just their copyright, but even personal information and datamining for possible leads. We are willing participants in what would amount to copyright infringement in the old world. However, we accept their intrusions for that sweet elixir called traffic. While the splog in affect does the same thing, and we call that criminal.

It is a complicated issue that a small post cannot answer, but I at least wanted to contrast from the "Phoenix' posting.

More on Free Stuff

Just a couple days after my last post on how nothing is for free, a British human rights advocacy group says Google has the most abysmal privacy policies and is leading a "race to the bottom" by the world's most renowned Internet firms. London-based Privacy International, which has monitored rights protections on the Internet since its fledgling days, ranked Google "hostile to privacy" in a fresh report that it staunchly defended on Sunday.