Learn SEO Directly from the Search Engines
Like organic search, one of the areas of search that brings a lot of traffic to businesses is Local SEO and Maps.
There have been a number of patents that focus upon local search, and show that it is often about structured data and Semantic marketing.
This is an area where citations have as much value as links, and businesses are considered local entities.
When you optimize a site for a business, often optimizing it for organic search and for local seo providing two separate sets of signals that business can be found through.
One of the earliest patents involving local search at Google was about collecting structured data about local business entities from sources such as data aggregators, enterprise business sites, and local business directories, which has them focusing upon consistency between those data sources, which is a major concern for local SEO.
Google was granted a local SEO patent this week to enable them to check whether people are following recommendations in search results to visit geographic locations – to see how many people visited those places. And it’s probably good for many businesses to have Google recommending that people visit them. For example, people living near … Read more
Google’s Popular Times Patent Google Maps helps people navigate from place to place and has been tracking how busy places are. For it to work effectively, it’s helpful to track the location history of the device that someone may be using to help them navigate. It’s interesting how Google tracks your location history. For example, … Read more
Fake Business Spam Detection in Local Search at Google The ultimate goal of any spam detection system is to penalize “spammy” content. ~ Reverse engineering circumvention of spam detection algorithms (Linked to below) Four years ago, I wrote a post about a Google patent titled, The Google Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent. It told us that Google … Read more
Do Search Click-throughs help rank pages at Google? In a recent article at Search Engine Land, we were told that Google Posts That Local Results Are Influenced By Clicks, Then Deletes That. It caught my attention and had me investigating further. Patents Involving Search Click-Throughs Influencing Search Results It made me recall three patents that … Read more
A Local search Google patent granted this week targets map spammers, who submit information about businesses to Google Maps, in a manner referred to as keyword stuffing, or more specifically keyword-stuffed business names. The patent attempts to find words submitted by business owners as titles for business names that trigger a surprisingness value for combinations … Read more