Google Maps SEO Update 02/14/11

Well, it doesn’t seem all that long ago, since our last post on Google place, yet an awful lot has changed since.

As many of have noticed in the UK, the phone verification days are over. I can only assume it’s Google’s way of tackling the ever growing problem of spam local listings.  For the black hat guys out there, this is simply a hindrance, yet for most of us, it’s maybe the end of junk local listings.

It also appears duplicate listings (as mentioned on our GL Secrets previous post) no longer seem to be an issue. It’s still early days, but recent testing shows this isn’t a major issue anymore.

How are guys getting to the top of Google Local?

We have discovered a few gems of late, and are happy to share them with our readers. As usual, it’s best to forget about everything you already know about Google local and start from scratch.

Analogy Alert!

Let’s think of our Google local listing as a boxing glove. The more weight behind the glove, the more damage it will do. The question is, how do we get more weight, and how do we know how heavy our own listing is?

The methods below are how the black hat guys do this, regardless of this, it will give you a clear idea on how Google Places ticks.

First of all , we only need to concentrate on 2 part of Google maps. For this example we have used the storm night club in London.

Key Factor 1.  More About This place.

Now these are the equivalent to back links when talking about standard SEO. These are crucial!







Key Factor 2: Photos & Videos.

Getting pictures attached to your listings is again another major factor in how well you rank

How does it all fit together?

Factor 1.

Google will add links on your “more about this place” section, based on the URL you input as your website.  If you input the URL bbc.co.uk  as your company website, Google will eventually give you links from BBC.co.uk. This is a major flaw in Google places at the moment.  It does take up to 6 weeks before you will be credited the links.  A lot of the black hat guys are simply duplicating existing listings, using a similar address, and same website. Google can’t seem to figure out which is the genuine one, so credits them both with links.  Once you have been credited with the links, you can literally manipulate the listing to whatever you wish.

Method commonly used online is to simply change the title of the listing (match to a keyword),  along with the categories  and upload new pics . Soon as this is done, depending on the quality of the links you just got, you can rocket to the very top of pretty much any search term you want. There’s literally thousands of listings like these out there. I’ve seen locksmiths ranking with MCDonalds links!

The benefit of you knowing this information is, not so you can attempt to use this method, but understand the difference between a heavy weight listing and weak one.

Your business maybe have 2 listings, so it’s often confusing knowing which to delete. Rule is to NEVER delete the one with the back links!

Factor 2.

Here we looked the pictures. These pictures again hold similar weight as the links we discussed above. The trick to getting these pictures is quite simple. There’s a lot of ways to do this, this is simply a 1 way.

Again this seems to be yet another bug with Google Places.

Google seems to read our business title and crawls the internet for pictures and videos relating to this. If our business is called ABC Media, chances are there are hardly any pictures out there for it to crawl. If however we change our business name to a landmark, again 6 weeks later, we seem to pick up dozens of photos the Google crawlers have found.  Sometimes it finds “related maps” and more vids and pics. Again,  once you have these stuck to your listing, it becomes a heavy weight listing . Changing the titles and messing with the categories will for sure give you a top ranking listing.

An example of a black hat guys using this method will be, changing the listing so it’s an address near the statue of liberty in the USA. Then changing the title of business to Statue of Liberty Lawyers. Once they have left the listing for 6 weeks,  the listing will be packed with photos videos and maps. Google does all the hard work.

We don’t share this information so people can abuse the Local maps. This is to demonstrate to our  readers the different methods, both good and bad that can be used to optimize maps. By understanding what the bad guys are doing, it gives us a clear idea of how Google ticks, and how we can use this information in a constructive way.

That’s all for now. Hope you enjoyed the post. If you want to keep updated with any of our future tests, follow me on twitter. http://www.twitter.com/ravindsandhu

Rav

This post was written by

Rav Sandhu – who has written 26 posts on Big Hit Media- SEO Blog.

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