You Must Pay to Play in Google

There have been a rash of blogs and forums who have noted a strange phenomenon of Google Local Listings not displaying their niche businesses anymore. These niches range from Web Design, Search Engine Marketing, to Real Estate.  Apparently,  according to Google, there was a glitch in a fix they rolled out and this caused some additional mishaps. This caused the map to disappear completely from search results for these niche businesses.

This problem was first noted in a Google forum back in September but there has still not been an resolution yet on a wide scale. This, as you might imagine, has caused a lot of people to be upset since they rely heavily on their position in Google Local Listings. This goes to show you shouldn’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

Now let’s look at this from another perspective. Some of the niches I listed above such as Web Design and SEO companies are intertwined. SEO has been considered by some to be an evil form of magic that helps a website rank better in the search engine results. Given, there are some out there that have given SEO companies a bad name but there are many more legit companies who apply SEO in a manner that does not violate any guidelines set by Google or the other major search engines.

What if Google decided that they wanted to start cracking down on the SEO companies of the world since they are crafting websites to rank well in the algorithms they create? The SPAM engineers sole purpose in life is to sniff out anyone who tries to game the system and get unatural results for their website. Once again, some shady SEO companies in the past have given a bad name to other legitimate SEO companies which created a need to start developing algorithms to stop them.

Now if you want to get the same exposure you were getting before by appearing in a local listings map, you will need to find some other way to promote your business. What better way to do that then Google Adwords. So now, not only does your company not display in the local listings, you now have to pay Google on a pay per click basis to get the relevant exposure you once had before. It is a win, win situation for Google.

This also goes to show that if your website was ranking well to begin with, then you wouldn’t be suffering from this situation now. Kind of ironic if you ask me.

Update: 12-14-09

This was posted on the Google forum from a Google employee who goes by “baseonballs”

“….That said, it looks like a lot of the recent search examples on this thread have to do with web design, SEO, and other services of that sort. It’s possible that instead of being related to the original issue, Google.com doesn’t bring up map results for these types of searches because the search term doesn’t show much local intent. In other words, there’s not enough local information in the query for Google to trigger maps results on Google.com. Searches for the same terms on maps.google.com, however, do bring up results.”

“I realize that more and more these types of services involve physical business locations, and I’ll let the team know so that we can continue to expand on the local results found on Google.com.”

Web Design and SEO do not have local intent? These searches have pulled up maps for years and now all of a sudden there is no public interest in these companies? This only adds to my speculation.