“Google Now Sees Owner Written Descriptions As Pretty Much Worthless”

Brother Blumenthal preaching the gospel when asked if there was any SEO benefit to varying your business’ description on different local directories:

“If there is a benefit, it would be quite small. Although there is no exact understanding of how Google uses directory descriptions, it would seem to be a minor or non-issue.”

and

“As a proof of the low esteem in which Google holds descriptions, look at how little the Google+ description field is actually used by Google itself. The descriptions entered by the business owner only appear on a page that is hardly seen at all by users. Since reviews have been pushed to the front page and Places search was removed, a user needs to click between two and four times to get to the Google+ “About” page where the description resides and that just isn’t going to happen.”

That said, I have a bone to pick with this assessment

“I have seen no indication that strong directory entries like Yellow Pages, Superpages or Yelp are not shown in search results due to a duplicate description.”

The key word here is “strong”. Strong sites can basically do what they please. It’s the not-so-strong sites that would benefit from having unique business descriptions, in the same way that a 2nd tier online retailer would benefit from having a different product description than Amazon’s.

Mike has some interesting thoughts about IYP categories as well.

(via Max Minzer)

IS THAT A PLEDGE PIN?!!!