March 18, 2011
Reviews & Google Places
Although reviews are indeed important in Google Places listings, they are one of many factors used in determining the display order of the SERP. Others likely include: the organic position of the listing for the page associated with the Places page, the authority and relevance of the sites listed as citations, and of course the relevance of the citation itself.
March 18, 2011
Keywords in Citations for Google Places
For many, the first things that springs to mind when the phrase ‘citations for Google Places’ is mentioned are address, telephone number, and name; however, citations ostensibly go beyond to include keywords.
Although Google, as of the date of this post, doesn’t vary the citations that it shows associated with a Places page, it does emphasize the keywords in the text of the citations shown. Now this emphasis may simply be a vestige of a former version of the algorithm or a side effect of Google’s software, however, Google likely does place at least some worth in the citation text when determining the display order of the Places listings in the SERP because of how important relevance is and how much Google has valued anchor text in the past.
March 17, 2011
Citations & RegEx in Google Places
Google’s regular expression, i.e. how they parse the web looking for mentions of a business, is very liberal. In fact, when viewing the Places page on a number of businesses, the vast majority of the citations listed did not have the exact name of the business as specified in on the Places page. Moreover, the regular expression for the address and telephone number of the business is as liberal, if not more so.
January 16, 2011
Greater Relevance May Equal Lower SERP Positions
If you’re already ranking highly for a particular keyword, but think you could create a more relevant page for that keyword, beware. Google doesn’t necessarily impute the authority of your older, less-relevant page to your newer, more-relevant page, especially if you have authoritative backlinks to the old page.
But why is that a problem? Google will often substitute your new, more relevant, page for your old page in the SERP and often cause a decrease in your SERP position.
January 13, 2011
Gruber on H.264, WebM, & Flash
Thus, dropping native H.264 playback from Chrome while still allowing H.264 playback via Flash Player isn’t going to drive adoption of WebM. It just means that Chrome users will get H.264 via Flash.
Although I hope he is right, he neglects to address the possibility of Google having a more sinister/arrogant/invidious, but less plausible, motive: screwing Apple 1) directly for Android’s sake and 2) indirectly to limit Apple’s future viability.
Because Flash can play WebM video, Google can directly target iOS users by converting all of YouTube’s video to WebM. The question is whether Google feels that this may help dissuade people users from buying iOS devices in the long-term at the expense of fewer YouTube users in the short-term.