A Week In Google – Round Up 24th March

Wow the week has flown by! Since I am at my Accelerated Learning Coaching course tomorrow, here’s this weeks Google round up done the night before.

Google Places – Why You Must Hide Your Business Address

Not long after posting how to hide your business address in Google Places, it appears that Google have snuck in a new rule.

If you do not see clients at your address, then you must choose the option to hide your address. I do keep a regular eye on Google guidelines and didn’t see this one introduced – there was no announcement either. To make matters worse it’s buried so deep you’d blink and miss it.

Here’s the new rule…

If you don’t receive customers at your location, you must select the “Do not show my business address on my Maps listing” option within your dashboard. If you don’t hide your address, your listing may be removed from Google Maps.

Local Search Ranking Factors

This first summary report is a statistical analysis of the most influential local ranking factors for Google Places. There’s a link at the top of the post to the more detailed report. It’s probably more info than normal people want to know. I love it! Fab job Bizable!

Universal Search – What sites are most visible? 

Universal search is Google’s standard search results that pull in listings from videos, images, news, maps and more. US and UK analysis from Searchmetrics. Not surprisingly, video reigns supreme still.

Social and Google Analytics

I’ve not had chance to play with this yet. A welcome addition to Google Analytics – The Social Report. Which sites are sending you the most traffic? What content is shared the most? These questions answered and more.

The Death Knell for too much SEO?

This snippet of news has been filtering through all week.

What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

– Matt Cutts speaking at SXSW Conference

I quite like Ed Dale’s view of it all – Winter is coming. Scorched Earth? It may seem rather dramatic, but that’s a pretty good description.   About time too… 

The next months won’t be pleasant for many and no doubt there will be collateral damage.  Like Einstein said, “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”  Playing it better doesn’t mean gaming the system…

There are no shortcuts.