Weekly SEO news: 19 June 2012

Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

40 local search marketers around the world participated in a survey to find the most important ranking factors for local search. If you want to get high rankings in Google's local search results the survey can help you.

In the news: the latest search engine statistics, Bing explains new algorithm updates, Yelp joins Bing and Apple, +1 clicks aren't that important and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO
1. Local search ranking factors survey: how to get high local rankings

40 local search marketers around the world participated in a survey to find the most important ranking factors for local search. If you want to get high rankings in Google's local search results the survey can help you.

local search

Why is it important to get good local rankings?

For some keywords (for example "plumbers"), Google shows local results at the top of the search result list. These websites aren't listed at the top because they have good content or good backlinks.

They are listed at the top because they fit to the geographic area of the search query. If keywords that show local results are relevant to your business, it is important to be listed in the local search results.

The five most important factors for local results

According to the survey, the following five factors are the most important factors that influence the overall ranking of a website in Google's local results:

  1. The physical address in the city of search
  2. Proper category association
  3. The proximity of the address to centroid
  4. The domain authority of the website
  5. The quantity of structured citations on Internet yellow pages websites and data aggregators

It also helps to have the city and the state on the landing page.

The top five factors that have a negative influence on your local rankings

The following factors can have a negative influence on your local rankings:

  1. A mis-match of phone numbers across data ecosystems. For example, tracking phone numbers can negatively affect your local rankings.
  2. Multiple Google Place pages with the same phone number.
  3. Multiple Google Places pages with the same or similar business title and address.
  4. A mis-match of the address and/or the phone number on Google Places and the landing page.
  5. Including location keywords in categories.

If your website doesn't have a crawlable version of your name, address and phone number on the landing pages, Google might not also give your website high rankings.

Getting high rankings on Google is important if you want to get more customers and more sales. If you want to find out how to change your web pages so that they get high rankings for your keywords, analyze your pages with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer.
2. Search engine news and articles of the week

StatisticsMay 2012 U.S. search engine rankings

"Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in May with 66.7 percent market share (up 0.2 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.4 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 13.4 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5 percent. [...]

In May, 68.9 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (up 0.2 percentage points versus April), while 25.6 percent of searches were powered by Bing."



Bing explains new algorithm updates

In a blog post, Bing explains how they handle spelling errors and typos when searchers type URLs into the search box. In addition, Bing improved recourse links and related searches.



Yelp joins Bing search engine and Apple Maps

"If users search on Bing, relevant Yelp reviews will display on the right side of the screen. Plus, Apple has joined forces with Yelp on its new maps application along with providing more content to Siri."



Matt CuttsGoogle's Matt Cutts: +1 clicks are not the best quality signal

"Google launched the +1 button, even before people knew about Google+, the social network. It was a way to tell Google that you felt a particular piece of content or search result was one of quality, and deserved to rank well in Google’s search engine. Now, Google’s Matt Cutts has admitted that it’s not really a great quality signal."



Google's John Mueller about reconsideration requests

In an online discussion, Google's John Mueller says that you can file a reconsideration request after removing most of the inorganic links:

"With 85% resolved, it sounds like you've covered a lot of ground already! If there are links that you're absolutely not able to remove, I'd document that with a reconsideration request along with the issues that you've been able to resolve."



Search engine newslets
  • Google updates hot searches list.
  • Apple veers away from Google.
  • Google's Tim Bray drafts new HTTP status code for censorship.
  • Apple Maps already has more business listings than Google.
  • Baidu to share revenue with Apple on China iPhone deal.
  • Nobody tracks web users more than Google & Facebook, report says.
  • Is click fraud a ticking time bomb under Google?

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3. Recommended resources

Roger Perking"You don't need to be an IT expert to run IBP and it works."

"I am a Cisco Engineer and had a website promoting my services, working in IT I thought I knew all about Google, but my site was not ranking anywhere for any of my searches, then a friend suggested I try IBP, I ran the trial of the software to see what it could do and it instantly highlighted some problems with my site.

After purchasing the full version I was amazed at what other information it told me, I just put in the phrases I wanted to rank for and it told me what I had to do, within a few weeks I started to see results, and now I rank on page 1 for my main search term - the phone just started ringing. IBP is such an amazing investment - do it for your business and you won't look back. You don't need to be an IT expert to run it and it works."
Roger Perkin, www.rogerperkin.co.uk



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4. Previous articles

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