{"id":15936,"date":"2013-12-17T10:07:20","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T14:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=15936"},"modified":"2013-12-17T13:35:03","modified_gmt":"2013-12-17T17:35:03","slug":"google-search-quality-issues-dogging-local-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/17\/google-search-quality-issues-dogging-local-results\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Search Quality Issues Dogging Local Results"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

The front page of Google is where the action is. \u00a0It’s often where a business has the first opportunity to present their brand, it’s where calls from potential customers start and discovery of a new businesses first takes place. \u00a0This is particularly true in local search results where your presence and the quality of the images shown are everything.<\/p>\n

And yet there have been a number of search quality issues dogging local search results that make that first impression painful, difficult and sometimes impossible. These problems have persisted for many, many months and for whatever reason the Google search team seems unwilling or unable to fix them.<\/p>\n

Here is a rogue’s gallery of these problems in order of longevity:<\/p>\n

No Entry, No Way<\/h2>\n

\"Screen<\/a>This problem was first reported<\/a> in the Google Places for Business forums in early July. \u00a0In mid July Googler Jade noted<\/a> “The gray circles appear in the place of deleted photos for a while before the photo can be fully deleted from our systems. This is taking a bit longer than usual right now.” \u00a0For some businesses the problem has been taking months and months. While there is a kludgey fix<\/a>\u00a0that works in some limited situations the problem still persists as you can see for the search for Hotels Chicago<\/a> where Trump International seems to have barred the doors.<\/p>\n

Hummingbird Poop<\/h2>\n

\"Screen<\/a>Hummingbirds are tiny, fast, energetic and little noticed in the real world. The same was mostly true of the Google Hummingbird update in August. But it turns out that hummingbird poop is as unpleasant as any other poop particularly when it sticks around for months and gets crusty.<\/p>\n

The problem in local, first reported<\/a> in Linda’s forum and updated here<\/a>, is that spammy local listings dominate head search terms and prevent the 7-pack from showing. Like this search for Chicago Plumber<\/a>. Some spammer is getting rich. But worse, real plumbers are not showing in the results.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/h2>\n

Un-Knowledgable Graph<\/h2>\n

\"Screen<\/a>Seaworld did exactly what Google wanted of them. They upgraded their local listings to G+ Pages in early October. Unfortunately for them, it precipitated<\/a> a bug in the knowledge graph that persistently refuses to show any images in the knowledge graph carousel\/info panel but the generic placeholder image. It didn’t affect just one of their properties but all eleven on them. \u00a0Its hard enough to compete against Disney with an anchor tied to your ankle. This one has been attached for over two months.<\/p>\n

Each of these problems has persisted for many months. In the case of the No Entry bug, for nearly half the year. It is ironic that when local support and local listing quality seems to be dramatically improving<\/a> since the nadir<\/a> a year ago, that general search quality issues are plaguing local.<\/p>\n

Everyone expects the occasional glitch in the display of their listing, they just don’t expect quality issues that have such important effects on their local business to be on going for months and months. Knowledge Graph and Hummingbird may be general improvements for Google but those benefits seem to have not universally filtered down to local search.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The front page of Google is where the action is. \u00a0It’s often where a business has the first opportunity to present their brand, it’s where calls from potential customers start and discovery of a new businesses first takes place. \u00a0This is particularly true in local search results where your presence and the quality of the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-plus"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15936"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15950,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15936\/revisions\/15950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}