Citation Building for Google Places Profiles

Over the weekend, I discussed the recent changes that have been implemented to Google's local algorithm and some of the issues that have arisen from those changes. Another topic that is coming to the forefront of the SEO community's consciousness relating to local search is citation building, and how that impacts a company's Places Profile rankings in the map results. It is important to address why citation building plays such a large role in local search.

Google Places Algorithm Changes

Google Places has become increasingly important from a search engine optimization perspective over the past 6 months or so. The Places algorithm changes that have occurred have been significant, and unfortunately not without flaw. Within this time frame, map results have been integrated in to the organic search results pages (SERPs), as opposed to being displayed on the side of the SERPs as they once were.

SMX West 2011: Takeaways for the SEO Industry

It was the search marketing event of the year. For two full days, people from the search engine marketing community gathered for SMX West in San Jose, CA to attend sixty sessions that featured more than one hundred speakers who discussed the latest trends in SEO. It was also an opportunity for many to try and come away with as much information as possible regarding the future landscape of the industry. As expected, Google's Matt Cutts was in attendance and was under siege with a multitude of questions surrounding the recently implemented farmer's algorithm change.

Google Farmer Algorithm Change - Who is Suffering?

Yesterday, I discussed the recent change to Google's algorithm that went live almost two weeks ago in an attempt to prevent content farms from appearing high up in the SERPs. There has been a lot of commotion since the update as many sites, including some that are not considered to be content farms, have seen a dramatic decrease in web traffic. Recently, Sistrix released statistics on a number of search queries that they maintained data for prior to and following the algorithm change to demonstrate who suffered the most from Google's most recent effort to improve their search results.

Google's Algorithm Attack on Content Farms

Only two months in to our new year, and the world of internet marketing and search engine optimization has undergone a fairly dramatic change. It was late January when Google first discussed that a major alteration would be made to their algorithm in an attempt to devalue content farms in the organic search engine result pages (SERPs). On February 24th, Google announced that the algorithm change had gone live. For those of you who may be unaware as to why Google would target content farms, it is necessary to know what these sites entail.