Hello, I don't know if everyone got wind of this, but in the Local Business Listings results for searches like seo, internet marketing and the such for a specified local search, the maps no longer appear. I know for ourselves we showed up in the 7 or 10 pack about 3 months ago, and now that no longer exists. You can read up on this issue in a thread at Google's help forum here. Also, feel free to search for anything related to "Google removes seo listings from local search" or any combination of keywords to learn more about this problem. I have to admit that this has not caused us any problems. Although the map no longer appears, we do show up for a local search within the organic results. Considering this problem has shown it's ugly head, we have been watching other potential problems. We are a Internet marketing agency and in the past six months we have been developing a new service in which we manage the local business listings for companies - claiming, updating, maintenance, qr codes, citations, coupons, etc etc on a weekly basis. We did a soft launch in the 4th quarter and then went to market officially as of January 4th. Not trying to deliberately advertise ourselves here, but explain the background of the question coming up. In Google's webmaster tools for this website, we noticed that the top three keywords sorted by significance are the words local, business and search. Within the top 20 keywords the word "listing" does not even show up. Yet in the entire site the three words "local business listing" go together. The word "listing" is not separated from the other two by any means. We checked third party keyword density tools and all of them show the most relevant keywords to be "local", "business", and "listing". Not only as single words, but as a phrase too. Considering the first problem that has shown up by Google with the local listing results for seo and internet marketing companies, it comes across very peculiar that in the webmaster tools, there is a missing word amongst the relevant keywords. I'm wondering if anyone else that is in the seo and internet marketing industry has seen any of the two above problems "against" their company by Google? Certainly open to commentary to better understand why there is a missing word in our webmaster tools at Google in this situation. If anyone has an explanation, by all means let me know. Don't want to cry wolf against Google unnecessarily. If you would like to take a look at any of the optimization on the local business listing website you can visit it at www.smartfindslocallisting.com Look forward to some feedback.
The steps Google are taking sure aimed to better serps. The more they can find alternatives to alleviate human modifications to improve serp, the better it would be honestly. Looks like this is directly diminishing the seo job. But still its a long way for softwares to grasp the webpages like human.
Google hurts everybody. Unfortunately ya'all haven't come to grips with that fact. You keep thinking these people care about you. They don't.
If google is doing this to prevent spammers from artificial SEO then i think its very very good news for original SEO experts. I think if some website is offering legal and original SEO services then it wont be effected by Google new policy.
Google will eat you. SEO companies are pretty much a scam, SEO coaching is the real way to go. Teach someone to do it for themselves is better in my opinion.