Have you ever wondered how the search engines’ algorithms rank sites within local search? Or better yet, what criteria are the algorithms considering and how important is each? I know my team members and I have talked about it before and have speculated and hypothesized what ranking variables the search engines consider and which the search engines find more important.
How do national brands take advantage of search at a local level? Join TMP Directional Marketing and Search Marketing Now for a webcast June 25th, 2008 at 12 PM CST and learn how your national brand can take advantage of local search.
Now that the first quarter 2008 numbers are in, one thing is certain: Google owns mobile search. This news comes after Nielson Mobile released its data on the mobile market. With 61% of the mobile search market cornered, Google dominated the mobile search market the first four months of 2008.
So what can we chalk this domination up to? Google is chalking it up to being the factory default on the iPhone. It seems that while smart phones have been around for awhile now, Google’s data indicates people are searching the internet more with their iPhones than any other smart phone. Who would have guessed a fully supported HTML browser would revolutionize the mobile search marketplace?
Google was recently the center of negative attention when it was brought to the publics’ attention that they did not have a link to their Privacy Policy readily available from their homepage. Yahoo! and MSN both implemented the policy on their respective homepages and in an attempt to ride the wave, Ask.com has recently added a link as well.
There is an interesting bit of news floating around that says Google does not index webpages whose URL ends in a zero. This particular type of address typically signals spam and therefore Google does not think highly of these types of pages.
Example of a page with the type of URL in question:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0
For more information, take a look at the article posted on SEOmoz.
As it turns out, this filter appears to be limited to URLs that end in zero. Other numbers have been getting indexed OK.
ZipLocal, a Canadian-based IYP, will become the first and only fully integrated North American local search solution. They came to this decison keeping in mind that the US market is 20 times larger than the Canadian market. It should be interesting to see if ZipLocal can compete with the current IYPs that dominate the US marketplace and how they set out to differentiate themself.