Local SEO According To The Leaked Google API Documents

UPDATED 6/5/24:
I added some more thoughts on how to apply this stuff to Local SEO on SearchEngineLand.com.

UPDATED 5/29/24:
I went through all of the data last night and found that 99% of this data is for map nerds. There is very little here to give us any clues about Local SEO. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing here. More like the limitations of using ChatGPT to summarize these docs. For example, https://hexdocs.pm/google_api_content_warehouse/0.4.0/GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.GeostoreFeatureProto.html has a lot more info than shown in our summary. So check out the links in the GSheet below to dive deeper.Here are the few things I found interesting from our data:

1. 1. Prominence
      “The relative prominence of this category to this feature according to the data provider, as one of the values from the enum above. Prominence is a measure of how well the given GConcept describes the feature. If the prominence of this GConcept is unknown, this field should not be set.” ChatGPT left out this critical part from the original doc: “An example is a gas station with convenience store and ATM. All three GConcepts are very relevant, but the gas_station GConcept is the most prominent.”
      
      How Can You Use This?
      A “GConcept” as best I can tell is kind of like a type of business, or a business category. In this case “Prominence” is the relative importance of each category when a business has multiple categories..There might be some implication on the use of primary and secondary categories. For example, if you don’t rank well for you primary category, it may be that Google thinks the secondary category has more Prominence.

1. 1. gobiSite
      “Whether this is a gobi site, ie, a site from a gobi domain that should be boosted for a category query with this gobi domain. For example, amazon.com is a gobi store domain for category query [hdtv] but some sites (like askville.amazon.com) from amazon.com should not be boosted.”
      
      How Can You Use This?”
      Gobi” is Punjabi for “cauliflower.” It also can be used as a mild insult. The Urban Dictionary says “Summed up reasonably well in English as ‘fat bas***rd’. So I am guessing this means sites that are trying to cover as many topics as possible. This is possibly the Google Maps version of the “Site Reputation Abuse” algo.If you’re a cauliflower, you may need to put that subdomain on a new domain.

1. count
   “The number of web pages that contains the url in their breadcrumbs”
   
   How Can You Use This?
   This is in a document about SiteLinks. It may reinforce that in order to get sitelinks to appear in SERPs, you need to put them in breadcrumbs on as many pages as possible.TLDR: These docs are interesting but not a lot of meat so far. Stay tuned!

ORIGINAL POST

As you would expect, SEOs are poring over the Google API documents leaked this weekend. See Rand Fishkin’s and Mike King’s posts for more info.

I thought it would be interesting to summarize all of the “Local SEO” relevant docs we can identify.

Here is a summary of 271 Google API Docs and 461 attributes that we have identified as relevant to Local SEO. We identified various terms that implied “local,” then crawled them with ScreamingFrog V. 20 connected to ChatGPT and had it summarize each document.

Access the GSheet directly at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kFg8QJ6IVUcGRyrK5bHZehRp9Yl7vSpjSeuatsJBjfU/edit#gid=0

We will be analyzing these docs over the next day or two and summarizing the data. If you find anything that looks interesting, feel free to DM me on LinkedIN and we’ll add it to the sheet.