Has anyone else noticed a major increase in Yelp, BBB, etc. results in local SERPs, pushing business websites further down?
-
Across multiple cities and markets, this seems to be a trend. "Chicago coffee shop" or "Minneapolis hair salon" or "Sacramento car repair" - outside the local 7-pack, virtually every result is Yelp, BBB, Yellowpages, etc.
Is this related to algo changes, or simply a result of those national sites pumping major resources into SEO? It just seems to be suddenly far more prevalent than it was even 6 months ago.
-
Good discussion going on here! While I agree with the comments here that strong local businesses are still faring well in the SERPs, I, too, have noticed Google's bias towards Yelp and actually blogged about this recently. A few years ago, there was a similar situation going on with Merchant Circle. Practically every local search would bring up Merchant Circle listings, but it seems to me that MC has now been replaced by Yelp with similar results. I rarely see MC results on page one, but Yelp has become extremely dominant. This could change, of course, but for now, having a well-maintained Yelp profile is very important for most local businesses.
-
I have noticed especially Yelp listings competing with local sites on the first page for a while. I have also noticed in the last week a slight jump. Yelp listings that were previously towards the bottom of the first page are now at the top. I can see other issues that Colin pointed out, but I see it on sites that are doing a lot of things right as well.
At least my clients are happy when it is their Yelp listing that is going up. Not so much when it is their competitors poaching the top spots!
-
Listings like Yelp have continued to increase their traction in SERPs in the past few years. Yelp is a very trusted source of information, especially on a local scale. Broad-match keywords like "local diners" will most likely give you Yelp or Google Places results, as opposed to individual websites.
When considering SEO, most people will focus their efforts on driving organic search traffic to their site. Really though, we should consider our online reputation as a whole. If you get a customer to walk in your front door, does it really matter if they found your webpage, or if they found you on Yelp or FourSquare? As marketers, our ultimate goal is to generate leads and convert them to sales - it does not matter how we reach the end result.
So in short - you shouldn't be alarmed by this, and shouldn't even feel threatened by it. Use these platforms to manage your online reputation, receive feedback, and engage your potential customers.
-
Noticed this as well--especially for some long-tails that we were ranking extremely high for steadily dropped to the bottom of the page and were taken over by sites with extremely high DA.
IMHO, Google probably steadily increased the weight of the DA factor and this caused a shift in the organic rankings.
-
I've seen a lot of un-optimized competitor sites get pushed back to page 2 and taken over by listings in the past couple months. But, the sites I take care of that don't have dupe content issues, mass spam links, and silly keyword stuffing are doing great!
I don't think engines are favoring anyone....I just think things are evolving, and local business websites need work! They tend to be crippled with technical issues, and have over-optimized copy and no real backlinks. And a lot of businesses are linking to their own Yelp or directory profile from the homepage of their website, sometimes anchored with the keywords they want to rank for. Lot's of issues going on here.
-
I've noticed it happening with the site s you mentioned and then some. I started a discussion about it awhile back. http://moz.com/community/q/interesting-serp-trend-i-m-observing
We've been outranked by ebay, amazon, wikipedia, and etsy.
-
I have noticed this getting worse for a while now. It is annoying but they carry a huge advantage in Domain Authority and will thus rank better. Hopefully you have a presence in all of those different directories.
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
-
URL in SERP: Google's stand
Months back, we can notice "keyword" will be bold and highlighted if its in the SERP URL. Now Google no more highlights any URLs even with exact match of keyword we search. Beside UI, Does this mean Google might devalued or reduced the importance of URL as ranking factor? We can see many search results match partially or completely in URL with search keywords.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
New Website Old Domain - Still Poor Rankings after 1 Year - Tagging & Content the culprit?
I've run a live wedding band in Boston for almost 30 years, that used to rank very well in organic search. I was hit by the Panda Updates August of 2014, and rankings literally vanished. I hired an SEO company to rectify the situation and create a new WordPress website -which launched January 15, 2015. Kept my old domain: www.shineband.com Rankings remained pretty much non-existent. I was then told that 10% of my links were bad. After lots of grunt work, I sent in a disavow request in early June via Google Wemaster Tools. It's now mid October, rankings have remained pretty much non-existent. Without much experience, I got Moz Pro to help take control of my own SEO and help identify some problems (over 60 pages of medium priority issues: title tag character length and meta description). Also some helpful reports by www.siteliner.com and www.feinternational.com both mentioned a Duplicate Content issue. I had old blog posts from a different domain (now 301 redirecting to the main site) migrated to my new website's internal blog, http://www.shineband.com/best-boston-wedding-band-blog/ as suggested by the SEO company I hired. It appears that by doing that -the the older blog posts show as pages in the back end of WordPress with the poor meta and tile issues AS WELL AS probably creating a primary reason for duplicate content issues (with links back to the site). Could this most likely be viewed as spamming or (unofficial) SEO penalty? As SEO companies far and wide daily try to persuade me to hire them to fix my ranking -can't say I trust much. My plan: put most of the old blog posts into the Trash, via WordPress -rather than try and optimize each page (over 60) adjusting tagging, titles and duplicate content. Nobody really reads a quick post from 2009... I believe this could be beneficial and that those pages are more hurtful than helpful. Is that a bad idea, not knowing if those pages carry much juice? Realize my domain authority not great. No grand expectations, but is this a good move? What would be my next step afterwards, some kind of resubmitting of the site, then? This has been painful, business has fallen, can't through more dough at this. THANK YOU!
Algorithm Updates | | Shineband1 -
Website traffic dropped 50% after 14th November same day GWT reported a DNS error
HI there. On 14th November GWT reported a DNS error on my site I checked with my hosts but they said there was nothing wrong. I then went searching for answers and found it happened to lot of people on that specific day see http://moz.com/blog/was-there-a-november-14th-google-update. After that time my website traffic dropped by 50% over the period of a week and is still sitting on 50% of what it was. I then moved the site to VPS, had a few DNS errors - that were the cause of my hosts - so i moved back to shared hosting last weekend and now DNS issues are solved. However the original DNS issue is still unknown I dont know what went wrong and want to rectify issue. I dont sell ads and write original content 4 times a day. I have a miniscule bounce rate, my site speed is okay and i dont stuff keywords in my content although i was careless with my <alt tags="">so they could be considered keyword stuffing (and i have up to 10 images on one post). But i have been removing all the keywords in my images theres over 3000 posts so its taking time). My impressions have dropped from 10,000 a day to 2,500 and I have no idea why.</alt> My website has been building traffic consistently for the last 2 years. Only now has it crashed a bit. Have you any advice on what I can do to solve this problem or rather find the cause of the issue. Im not a pro seo person and do this blog in my free time so am not an expert on data analyzing etc.... thanks alot
Algorithm Updates | | mutant20080 -
Mutliple Websites for Same Company (different areas of practice)
My company has had one primary website for a number of years, a few years back we created a second website separate and apart from the first one to generate more business in a niche market that we cater to. Since then we ended up adding 3 more websites to help increase our footprint with more content. Each of the new websites deal with a major aspect of our business and the content generated on those websites are related to those areas of our business. My question is - is it bad idea to have a network of 5 websites for SEO-purposes? What are the pros and cons and why? Any supporting resources to back up your position would be greatly appreciated. Note there is no "duplicate content" problem here, all content we create is unique to the site it is hosted on.
Algorithm Updates | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
Could EMD (Exact Match Domain) have cause SERP drops?
Hi all, Another suggestion was given for our fall in SERPS. Recently Matt Cutts announced that EMDs would be hit by new algoritms. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-20-15789.html Only our site with exacts matches... cours-telephone-anglais, curso-ingles-telefono, kurse-englisch-telefon, and corso-inglese-telefono were hit. Does anyone else have experience of this? Would a solution be to create new URLS and redirect? Or would a redirect carry the penalty over? Is there anyway to fix that sort of penalty? Many thanks for your help.
Algorithm Updates | | Quime0 -
Website taken a hit?
We have recently (yesterday 12<sup>th</sup> April) taken a hit for our main keywords it seems that there is no constant fall but it seems to be the most competitive words as anything that ranked purely on content still seems to rank which makes me assume that we have just lost a lot of power from links (are SEO did build quite a few links from article sites he also built a few blog network links which we did not know till we got the webmaster message 3 weeks ago (24<sup>th</sup> may) and we have made him remove them all but some still show which a) he can’t contact or b) were scrapers). But on the other hand we still have decent on site content and some good links from graphic design blogs (review articles) which would suggest a penalty as some sites with poor links and poor on site content are outranking us for a couple of our good keywords. I cannot decide if this is a penalty, keyword anchor text penalty (this is wiping more power out than the bad links) or just devaluation of links (but as said before our good links are still much more powerful than the competitors out ranking us and with our content we should easily not have lost many places). If I was going to come up with an idea it would be like the bad links have taken twice there power away from the site, so our on site content is still good but compared to medium on site and crap links they are out ranking us. (we did use a lot of anchor text with keywords in) If this is the case if we build gooad quality review links, press releases and make them more natural not go for normal link building – articles ect would this help and has anyone ever dealt with this before and have any idea how to know what is happing and how long it might take to recover.
Algorithm Updates | | BobAnderson0 -
Does my overly dynamic website hurt my SEO?
I have heard from a couple of people that my overly dynamic URL's hurt my SEO tremendously. Can anyone verify that? Of course my provider says it doesn't matter but I take what they say with a grain of salt. Another thing, my web crawls show a TON of errors for duplicate page title and overly dynamic url and duplicate page content. How big of a deal is this? http://www.nvclothing.com
Algorithm Updates | | sviohl0 -
Selling same procucts from more than one website
I would like to know whether it's ok to sell same products from 2-3 websites. Design and URL structure will be different but same e-commerce platform. Would google penalise or drop the rankings, etc. How google deall with this sort of thing? If problem arises how can we get around it? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Jvalops0