Has anyone else noticed a major increase in Yelp, BBB, etc. results in local SERPs, pushing business websites further down?
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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.
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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 Practically every local search would bring up Merchant Circle listings, but it seems to me that MC has now been replaced by Yelp with similar results.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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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