Author: andrewsho

As Google morphs SERP design from desktop to mobile, it appears that it has decided that reading words is perhaps too much to ask of our educationally-challenged fellow users. And so it is now testing icons in the mobile results as shown below: I guess it’s easier to click on a cute picture than try to read text while you’re driving right? Rivers Pearce of Boomtown ROI just sent me this screenshot. It’s from results from the iOS Google Search…

Steve Shackford‘s tweet got me thinking: @localseoguide Expedia-like move from Google’s algo today on “Dallas Hotels”. http://t.co/EeM4m7Kl8s jumped to #1. pic.twitter.com/SkzigIRSuH — Steve Shackelford (@HydrophobicDuck) August 7, 2014   We are definitely seeing a lot more national-local directory type sites showing up at the top of local SERPs as a result of Google removing or de-emphasizing the local pack results. For the most part I am seeing strong brands like Yelp, TripAdvisor & Zillow basically maintaining their high rankings now…

  The SEO Catch-22: You’ve done all of the typical technical and content SEO stuff but your organic traffic keeps trending downwards Your SEO guy suspects the culprits are the above-the-fold in-content Adsense units designed to look like content Problem is they are your top performing ad units by a factor of at least 10x Fix the ad units and maybe your traffic will turn around, but for sure your revenue will dive before then Don’t fix the ad units…

My initial review of Google’s Pigeon results, Picking Through Google’s Pigeon Droppings…, was posted on SEL yesterday, but it was written last week and a lot has changed since I submitted it. I was going to write an update here but Linda Buquet’s massive review of pre and post Pigeon SERPs does the job well, so let’s leave it to her. Here’s her take on what you can do for now, but read the whole post: 1) Google is in…

A dentist called me a few minutes ago with a request to help get rid of a Google My Business page that had been automatically created by Google. The page was for his nephew who had considered joining the practice but never did. Somehow Google got hold of his data and created the page. It will be easy enough to get Google to shut the page down via GMB support and I could quickly check the main data aggregators, but…

Woke up this morning to find what appears to be yet another shuffling of Google’s Pigeon update. In this case I am seeing some food query SERPs display local packs, directories and knowledge graph results – but no recipe results. Taco Click to Enlarge for Analysis Hamburger Granted I am only seeing this for queries using singular nouns. Recipes still come up for “hamburgers” and “tacos”. But my hunch is that Google is now overweighting local results in its new…

I have a client who had implemented schema incorrectly and received a notice from Google that they needed to fix it “if you would like it featured in Google search results”. Of course they didn’t provide any specifics and Schema.org documentation is often confusing: http://t.co/ltB6NKX0eX‘s real mission was to create a lot of confusing conversations about how to implement schema — Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) June 19, 2014 Then I noticed this very helpful review of Wisconsin Health Insurance, because so…

Yesterday a client pushed out a new homepage without telling us. I found out because late last night I got this email in my inbox from an actual living, breathing member of Google’s Search Quality team:   Say what you will about Google (and clients who double-noindex their homepage), but this is pretty awesome.

Yext launched a duplicate business listings suppression service today they are calling Powerlistings Über. That’s fancy talk for saying you can now kill duplicate business listings on publishers in the Yext Powerlistings Network with extreme prejudice. For those of you who have tried to squash duplicate citations and found it to be an endless and expensive game of whack a mole, you may want to check out Yext. Here’s how it works: Yext automatically identifies duplicate listings on a particular…

Hey local SEO geniuses! We just released a free Google Chrome extension to help you speed through citation research. It’s called N.A.P. Hunter Lite. It basically runs a set of standard N.A.P. queries through Google so you can quickly find various citations, their URLs and their Google position. Check it out here and let me know what you think. Big kudos to Dan Leibson for spearheading this effort! It’s a great little tool.