The meaning is to use it instead of your own site’s URL. this way, you’ll be able to hack the local directory or vertical organic result.

When you say “Take the exact URL and use it in your Places Dashboard” you meant in the Website field of your listing or can it apply anywhere like in the Additional details for example. ?

I find when trying to ballpark the impact of organic vs Places standing that if you look at a given result in AOL it gives a better sense of a “pure” organic rank of a listing without the apparent influence of the local listings… and might give you a sense of the final weight of organic vs local better

1. What does LOB stand for?

When you say your site is ranked 12th is that 12th including the LOB or is it 12th on a site like AOL that is more “pure” organic results?

I can’t speak for Yelp, but it does appear there’s less focus on integrity outside of the “editorial” reviews.

It’s an inherent disconnect between the desire for organic reviews and the need to sell something.

@PureSheer,

AWESOME!

Look for a hand-edit soon

Great stuff indeed!
Also, like the good old time of spam, you can change once a month your URL to other Local verticals, city-sites & even Wikipedia, etc… By that you’ll be able to piling up heaps of citations. After a while, you can change the URL back to your site’s & you got your self an A1 listing.

BTW, Guys,

I’m still trying to figure out the LOB weight between the listing it self & the organic position. meaning:

From my R&Ds, i can learn that a listing, when changing its URL to site you want to hack its organic result, will ‘pull up’ the result (now LOB) into a MUCH higher position.

I have 2 examples:
1. I have a listing in Toronto ON that keeps coming & going from the Maps index. My site’s organic position is 12 (top of 2nd page). When the listing ‘comes’ the LOB is 4th in the 1st page!!!

2. My 1st experiment, when i found out the trick of organic’s hacking by a Maps listing, showed this:
I wanted to hack (just for the experiment) Super Pages organic result, ranked 8th for the term Locksmith Garden Grove. I just created a listing in Google Maps with SuperPages URL & 3 weeks after that, both my listing & SuperPages result became a LOB, ranked 3rd (& my listing got a Locksmith category!!!!! which is REALLY RARE!!)

Any other results or thoughts?

Actually…here’s another fun one (that was recently addressed in an update and doesn’t work well) and I am glad as I was competed against a few listingswho were doing this.

1. Create a listing for a City Name
2. Set the City Name category to City Center
3. Wait a few weeks
4. When the listing has tons of citations and UGC on it, plug in your real categories and a keyword with the city name.
5. Have a super listing that doesn’t even need reviews to have a major social signal.

This was “almost” undetectable. The only way I was able to figure it out was by the User Generated Content only showing a mention of the City Name and not the business. Then I found a listing that was being “baked” and put the 2 together.

Where there is an algo, there will always be loop holes. It still doesn’t change the fact that hard work overtime will prevail.