Last week Andrew Shotland noted some traffic declines for a number of local directories that he associated with the Door Way Page Algo update.

In that post, Phl Rozak  of LocalVisibility noted in the comments to that post that he had simultaneously seen an increase in pack results not just for real estate but for other search terms like “DUI law, water damage restoration, and possibly like Botox and liposuction”. I finally got around to looking and saw the clear increases in real estate searches.

Late last week Dr. Pete of Moz alerted me to a dramatic uptick in the Moz Cast count for local results. I have been following them since and they seem to clearly mirror what Phil had noted and the observations in real estate searches.

In fact they show a jump in the number of Local Packs being returned from  10% of all searches to now being shown in 12%, an increase of 20%.

I think it unlikely that this was a coincidence. The removal of doorway pages could have allowed what local web pages were there to move into the top 3-5 positions in the search results thus triggering more packs. Or perhaps there was some other local change. For example if Google started trusting some new locally prominent sites that added enough relevance to the local listings to facilitate their showing. Regardless, there are now more packs appearing for search terms that until recently had none.