Googles Changing the Roogles

The SEO and local marketing world is buzzing today as the latest sweeping changes from Google are rolled out around the world.

No longer will you be able to have a top position in Google Places and no website. No longer will you be able to claim top spot with organic search and not bother with Google Local Business Center.

From now on, you'll need both. Experts and pundits, and SEO professionals around the world are watching as the new set up is tested, trialled and tweaked by Google. The idea is to combine local search results in such a way that your Places (or Maps) listing is merged with your main website listing when people search for a local service. Possibly.

But it's all so up in the air still, that no one, except perhaps Google, actually knows how it will all look when it settles down again next week. Google themselves may not have decided, if the multiple screenshots and test results I've seen are anything to go by - they're still testing.

Personalised results have been coming for some time, too, so it may be that we'll never again see a 'typical' Google results page. Maybe we'll all see something different every time we search from now on.

It's exciting for SEO professionals, and probably quite baffling for bystanders, but the important thing is, we're on to it.

If you want the very latest optimisation strategies to make your online marketing as effective as it can be (and that's very effective indeed) we know exactly the people to go to - us.

Contact Cinnamon Edge for the latest help with SEO, local search and search engine marketing. Ask us about our training workshops, too. We'll be putting on a special Google Changes one very soon.

Roy

Contact us by email roy@cinnamonedge.co.uk or phone 01284 753912

Update on Our Google Dance

You have to love it when a plan works!

If you read the previous post you'll know we experienced a version of the 'Google Dance' with one of our client websites - Dentist Bury St Edmunds.

The site was on page two or three. Not on page one but definitely in contention.

Then, suddenly, it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't even indexed by Google, which could have been alarming. But we remembered a phenomenon that we'd witnessed once or twice before, and which some people call the 'Google Dance', where a website can simply disappear from the listings, only to reappear just as suddenly and even in a higher position than before.

And guess what? Our dentist site has done just that. Reappeared as if from nowhere, only not on page two or three, but on page one, as we hoped it would.

Result!

Roy

PS. Meanwhile, a front page site I created for local Bury St Edmunds courier company, Must Go Couriers, is still firmly parked on page one, where we left it some months ago. But now it has a Youtube video and a link directly to Must Go's official website, so they can start to reap the benefits of Cinnamon Edge's online marketing expertise.

Seen a Bury St Edmunds Dentist Dance?

We recently created a new site for a client on a new domain, called Dentist Bury St Edmunds. The performance of the site in the SERPs (search engine results pages) reminded us of an enduring mystery...

One of the bigger puzzles in search engine optimisation is a phenomenon known as the 'Google dance'.

Sometimes a website will be indexed quite quickly by Google and might even appear on the first few pages, especially if it's been set up with SEO in mind.

With on-page SEO and some nice incoming links, a site can quickly be successful. But sometimes it will then simply disappear. The site is still there if you type in the URL, but it doesn't come up in the search results.

Then, just as suddenly, the website will reappear in the listings. It might be a few days or it may take longer, but when the site does come back it will often be in a higher position than previously.

This is what SEO experts call the Google dance, and it's what happened to our dentist site.

It looks like the most important thing, when a site disappears, is to continue link building, bookmarking and so on, as though everything was fine. This may be why, once Google decides to index the site again, it often appears higher in the SERPs (because it now has more links than it did before). It's also important to give the site the authority that steady link-building bestows on a website, because authority is a big thing with Google.

So the lesson is, if your new site disappears from site, don't panic. Carry on as if nothing was wrong, and chances are that very soon your website will be doing even better than it was before.

Here's the website we're talking about, for Dentist in Bury St Edmunds.

Roy