Matt McGee of Search Engine Landrecently wrote an article on how SEO’s and Web Designers won’t list well with-in Google or Google maps.
Read more > http://searchengineland.com/google-hides-seos-web-designers-32671
Why does Google have it out for web designers and SEOs? That question has been going around for nearly two months, particularly in this thread in the Google Maps Help Forum. And, as Barry Schwartz reported on Search Engine Roundtable, Google employee “Joel H” (likely Joel Headley) posted an update today saying that it’s not a bug (as originally said to be), but a specific, conscious decision on Google’s part not to show these types of businesses on a map.
“Today, we’re intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham]. I’m sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.
“I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today.”
What Joel H. is saying is that certain industries won’t get local business listings even with a city name included in the query, but they might get a 7-pack if the query includes a word like “in.” So, for example, queries like “seo seattle wa” (even with the state abbreviation!) and “web design seattle” don’t show local listings with a map:
What we have is a pattern of behavior that closely mirrors racial profiling. Assuming someone is terrorist because they are of middle eastern decent, assuming someone is guilty because they are black, or assuming all SEO’s are guilty of being link brokers just because they know the value of a link, it’s all profiling and it’s all wrong.
We’ve been discussing and debating this for years and at this point is pretty obvious Google isn’t going to change their policy. However what we can do is band together and continue to point out where google profiles SEO’s and educate more people to Google’s inconsitant behavior.
Until these search results change, or until there’s a better explanation from Google, expect to see plenty of comments and posts about Google profiling SEOs in 2010.
