Can Location Information Decrease National Search Volume ?
-
Has anyone observed the effect on G organic traffic when a site which has little or no location information suddenly registers with the reputable "local" directories?
I am especially curious about results observations based upon G's behavior during the past several months.
It might be a hosting problem (the host is performing some non-routine mantenance) or possibly even a HUGE change in G's algo but I've observed a huge drop in my traffic after claiming a couple of the local listings earlier this week. Until then, I doubt G had associated my site with my city.
A couple of other explanations are possible but the timing leaves me to doubt it's a coincidence.
T.I.A.
-
Thanks for following up, JustDucky.
-
Panda 3.5 and Penguin as it turned out. You and Miriam were spot on.
THX to both of you.
-
Miriam has a much better head for local than I do, but my sense of recent local updates (like "Venice") is the same as hers. If Google starts to treat a SERP as local, then being seen as local should help you and being seen as may hurt you. On average, I think we're seeing more SERPs being treated as having local intent, so generally getting Google to locate you should be a positive. Of course, for any given keyword, there could be exceptions (especially if you get a huge amount of traffic from a few broad, "head" terms).
Hosting issues can always cause short-term problems, and there have been a lot of shake-ups in the algorithm recently. Google is probably testing over-optimization updates (not full roll-outs, but we're seeing weird things happening), and they had a glitch on 4/17 that shook up some sites. They've also been hitting link networks hard, but I find it hard to believe that a handful of reputable local directories would be impacted by that. If you built up 100s of low-quality directory links and doubled your link profile in the process, that could be trouble. Adding a couple of directories to a solid profile should pose no risk.
My gut reaction is that there's more going on here than just local factors.
-
Hi JustDucky,
I've been working in Local for 5+ years and yours is a question I have seen asked frequently, but for which I have never seen an official study performed, the question being: does being local make you less national. All of the informal discussions I've ever had on this topic indicated a big no on this. Local is better thought of as an addition to your traditional, national SEO, rather than a detractor from it. So, my guess is that your ranking drop is unrelated to you claiming local listings (most of which take more than a couple of days to go into effect and ripple out onto the wider web anyway).
I do know that there have been some big changes reported recently...potentially an algo shakeup of some kind that has nothing to do with Local. I'm going to ask one of our expert traditional SEOs to pop by this thread to help you investigate possibilities for your loss of traffic. I would be very surprised if the local listings had anything to do with this. Hang in there!
Miriam
-
Just throwing out some thoughts here...
Is it possible that your claiming the local directory listing propagated a duplicate listing to a major platform (e.g. Superpages > Google) which busted your clickthrough rate?
Or was the traffic coming in from national search queries and not local ones? Any discernible rankings drop, or traffic loss to a keyword group?
Google's Venice update, maybe? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html
I've seen some local companies start to rank for non-geographic search terms due to this update. Because local companies are ranking, non-local companies have been bumped down the list.
Decent post on that here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
How did my dev site end up in the search results?
We use a subdomain for our dev site. I never thought anything of it because the only way you can reach the dev site is through a vpn. Google has somehow indexed it. Any ideas on how that happened? I am adding the noindex tag, should I used canonical? Or is there anything else you can think of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Can we do Citation posting for national business?
I have payment gateway website, website provide services to US and other countries as well. Can I do citation posting for the website? Website is having contact us page with US address on it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
How can I see all the pages google has indexed for my site?
Hi mozers, In WMT google says total indexed pages = 5080. If I do a site:domain.com commard it says 6080 results. But I've only got 2000 pages in my site that should be indexed. So I would like to see all the pages they have indexed so I can consider noindexing them or 404ing them. Many thanks, Julian.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julianhearn0 -
Can DIVS that look like frames hurt?
We are working with a site that has what appears to be a frame in the middle but it is not targeting a new html page it is just a div hiding content until you use the scroll bar. What are best practices for working with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | siteoptimized0 -
Increasing Search Queries
Recently I had a drop in the over all number of search queries my website was ranking for (about 50%) on October 5th. I did not lose rankings for my target keywords. How can I regain these lost opportunities?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raph39880 -
Can Google read my backlink in Javascript??
Hi SeoMoz community! I have a software product, which our clients implement onto their websites. It is like a pop up box. I know that backlinks are very important for SEO ranking, and I really want to give our clients 2 options of product: 1. you can get the free/cheaper option if you use the code which has a keyworded backlink to our site on it 2. you can pay small fee if you don't want to use the version with a link to our site on it Now, the problem is that the product is written entirely in Javascript, and I don't think that Google crawls this, do they? Is there a way around this? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qdigi0 -
How to show country name in google search result
I have a site with tld .com but my target country is United kingdom so i want to show United Kingdom in SERPs.How can i show it ? I have already set target country United Kingdom in Webmaster tools but still it is not showing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000