Google Answers Your Local Questions
In an earlier post, I solicited questions for Google about local search. My intention had been to present them at the What’s New in Local Search panel at SMX East this morning. But I didn’t get my act together to distribute them at the session. Google’s Eric Stein, who was on the panel, coordinated the response to the questions.
Here are the unedited, verbatim questions and answers:
Q: Are there any techniques for tracking clickthroughs from the 10-pack, 3-pack, or authoritative OneBox in Google Analytics (or other tracking programs)? The current URL strings only seem to show them as organic clickthroughs.
Google:: Local Universal results are organic results and there is no plan to separate them.
Q: It is considered a best practice in all of Google’s other properties (Adwords, Organic Results, News, Blogs, Images) to include keywords in titles. Why does Google consider local results to be an outlier in this ecosystem? Does Google have plans to stop bolding keyword matches in Local Business Titles? If not, why not, as there have been plenty of studies that show that a keyword match dramatically increases clickthrough rate?
Google:: On Google Maps, our mission is to show users the proper names and addresses of physical businesses. The Business Title is not the title of a website - it is the title of the actual business. Adding keywords to this field moves away from giving users the proper representation of the businesses they see on the map.
We have no plan to stop bolding keyword matches in titles. Bolding matches in titles and categories for example helps the user understand why we’re showing the result.
Q:: Can you tell us about authoritative sources in Google local? If a user makes a comment or requests a change, vs. a business owner, vs. a competitor, vs. a validated business owner, vs. a third party submission site (yellow pages, Yelp), whose content takes precedence? For us that is the biggest problem because it appears that Google takes that information and somehow creates a listing…not using the business owners listing.
Google:: A business owner’s verified listing trumps all other sources in terms of fields displayed. LBC-verified listing is the most authoritative source. The least authoritative is a single reference on an unverified web page. Everything else is in between those two ends of the spectrum. In terms of creating the listing, we distinguish between the “listing” and the “cluster.” We display the “cluster” which is composed of the union of one or more listings. When the fields in a listing overlap, the listing with the highest authoritativeness trumps the others; but it doesn’t block additional fields (like cuisine, parking, etc.) from being associated with the cluster.
Q:: Are you penalized for submitting your data on a weekly basis? Or should you let your data mature?
Google:: No; however if you’re making changes to your listing that prevent us from recognizing that it’s the same business as the one referenced by other sources in the cluster, then there is a risk that your listing becomes “orphaned” from the cluster and thereby loses the associated content and any positive ranking from that content.
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