Inside Scoop on Google Maps Rankings

Eric Enge held a fantastic interview, well worth a full read, with Google’s Carter Maslan, the Director of Product Management for Google Local.

Several gold nuggets can be found in the interview, so I wanted to highlight the ones that popped out to me the most:

1) Proximity to city center not important anymore

Carter Maslan: Exactly, as for proximity to centroid that is an old issue which we’ve addressed, so that is not too important any more. Early in the history of local search people would try to setup locations near the centroid, but that is just not that important any more.

2) Claiming a listing not the important thing, its the content

Carter Maslan: Sure. So claiming your listing by itself is not so much the issue but what is important is having good control over the way that your business is described.

3) Reviews are looked at and considered, but don’t carry as much weight as other factors

Carter Maslan: We do look at reviews. It is not so much something that will radically change where you are in the results, but we do consider it.

I think reviews may teeter totter a bit in the algorithms, and find a happy medium of weight they give to rankings. Why not rank a local business better if it has quality reviews, much more beyond its competitors? When there is that extra layer of content about their content (dare I say meta data), local search engines would be dumb to ignore it because that’s exactly what I want to see.

4) Links AND citations are both significant contributors, more so links (specifically anchor text)

Carter Maslan: Just the fact that there is an implicit link in the geospatial world, is not as strong as the explicit anchor text that goes straight to an URL that we know is a definitive domain for a business. But yes, it does help to have your business well-described and geo-coded in references on different pages.

This is where not having a website is a major disadvantage, not only for missing traffic from general searches, but the weight it carries in Local Search.

5) Get a KML file, it helps

Carter Maslan: Yes, it helps a lot in knowing the precise geographic location that is being described by a page so it is definitely good to have a sitemap that references a KML file with an accurate description of the entities referenced geographically.

I have blogged several times about doing whatever it takes to gain “trust” with Google, and a KML file is great because it is somewhat “authenticated” when you get the coordinates, etc. and gives Google another reason to acknowledge your business and its location.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Google Maps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.