Effective Link Building Service: Locals Only: A New Behemoth Emerges In Google Maps: Wikipedia

**A New Behemoth Emerges In Google Maps: Wikipedia**

**by Chris Silver Smith**

Google's recent introduction of Place Pages
<http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-place-pages-gets-rid-of-tabbed-info-bubble-26506>
within Maps came in sync with some key adjustments in the factors
used to rank local search content. The combination of changes has
resulted in Wikipedia abruptly emerging as a major influence on local
search rankings. I'll describe what appears to have ve happened, and
how it may have impacted your local business rankings.

When Place Pages were introduced into Google Maps, Google was
attempting to expand content to provide locations and information
about all sorts of things beyond just businesses. The Maps team sought
to provide information about points-of-interest such as parks,
monuments, forests, major buildings, historical markers, natural
features and more.

Google Maps simultaneously added what I've referred to as landmark
icons
<http://searchengineland.com/can-your-business-achieve-landmark-status-in-google-maps-31045>
embedded into the user interface display of maps which are icons
pinpointing the newly introduced points of interest in addition to
particularly popular businesses (the businesses have also been
referred to as Favorite Places
<http://www.google.com/help/maps/favoriteplaces/gallery/>
, and Google internally refers to the clickable landmark icons as
Smart Maps).

The Google Maps ranking algorithm was adjusted to identify and rank
landmark places and the businesses which are Favorite Places. To do
this, Google introduced a concept called PlaceRank, which was
perhaps first highlighted <http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=708>
by Bill Slawski in 2007 in a post analyzing the patent which Google
had been granted, Entity Display Priority In A Distributed Geographic
Information System
<http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20070143345.PGNR.&OS=dn/20070143345&RS=DN/20070143345>
.

You don't have to slog through the patent and conduct research to see
if PlaceRank is at play. quoted by TechCrunch quoted John Hanke
<http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/06/google-local-maps-qr-code/>
, Google's vice president of Product Management for Google Earth &
Google Maps, stating that businesses were selected as Favorite Places
based upon PlaceRank:

They are selected based on their PlaceRank, says John Hanke, VP of
Google Earth, Maps, and Local. PlaceRank is like PageRank for places
it tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such
as references on the Web, reviews, photos, says Hanke, how many
people know about it, how long its been around.

If you really want to understand PlaceRank, you should now ask
yourself just what are the specific sources that Google is using to
obtain references? For businesses, it's obvious that some of those
sources are internet yellow pages and other authoritative business
directories and review sources. And, one can easily find Panoramio
photos, Flickr photos and YouTube videos throughout Maps. But, what
were the content sources that Google used to identify Places which are
not necessarily businesses, like parks and monuments?

It's not surprising that Google would look towards Wikipedia for info
about landmark places. The content is rich, deep and available for
free under Creative Commons licensing. Marketers have long observed
Google's love of and near-preferential treatment of Wikipedia pages
<http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/012371.html>
in regular web search results, so one could have predicted seeing
excerpts and references to Wikipedia showing up on Place Pages in
Google Maps, such as for the famous Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los
Angeles:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/4228188785/>

One indicator of how important Wikipedia content is in the new local
algo the addition of a feature allowing one to view icons of Wikipedia
content within maps for geotagged articles:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/4228557039/>

It appears to me that Google may have rushed development of
mashing-up PlaceRank with existing business listings, because I've
found a number of examples where Google Maps appears to have confused
Wikipedia article pages with businesses that only have a coincidental
association with the article.

It appears to me that if your business is notable enough to merit a
Wikipedia article, this provides a sort of endorsement indicating that
you're popular enough to be considered a local landmark, and Google is
weighting that citation very heavily in the local ranking algo. As
with the example image above for the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in
Los Angeles, businesses which have a Wikipedia article dedicated to
them are nearly guaranteed to be in the top of the search results
within Maps and within the 7-pack under universal search (Amusingly,
and perhaps tellingly, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery seems to be
mislabeled in the 7-pack for some reason at the moment, instead
mis-titled as Hollywood Flandmark Cemetery
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/4228227281/>
).

For famous businesses such as the Hollywood Forever Cemetery or
Grauman's Chinese Theatre, both the rankings and the association with
the Wikipedia articles are justified. These are indeed highly popular,
famous places, the Wikipedia articles are specifically about them and
the businesses ought to rank highly for queries specific to them.

Yet there are now an astonishing number of cases where Wikipedia
pages are apparently misassociated with businesses, resulting in
abrupt shifts in Google Maps rankings, and very unmerited high
rankings. I see cases where Google Maps is using very loose/fuzzy
logic to match names of businesses with titles of Wikipedia articles.

For instance, try searching for Attorneys, New York, NY, and one of
the top listings is for the Bowling Green Associates LP firm. If you
click to their Google Maps Place Page
<http://maps.google.com/places/us/10004/new-york/broadway/11/-bowling-green-associates-lp>
, you'll find relatively few references cited for the law firm, but
quite a few references and the Wikipedia content for the Bowling
Green Park
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Green_(New_York_City)>
which is apparently adjacent to their building:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/4229363772/>

When you see this, you have to ask yourself, does this business
justify getting top placement for attorneys in this highly
competitive market, or did they merely luck into it because they
happened to have a landmark park included as part of their business
name? One might assume there were other ranking factors at play, but
there are too many similar cases to think this is an isolated
occurrence.

For another example, search for doctors, miami, fl in Maps, and one
of the top listings is for CAC Florida Medical Centers Little
Havana:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/4228642997/>

Is this ranking justified for doctors in Miami? Well& maybe. I'm
guessing the Clinica Asociacion Cubana for Little Havana might be
pretty well-known in the Cuban population in Miami, but the profile
for this clinic or hospital should not be filled with information
about the Little Havana neighborhood that has been introduced with the
Wikipedia article content.

A much more dramatic example is the Place Page for Phillips Russell
PhD, a psychologist who ranks high in Cambridge, MA, apparently just
because his name bears a passing resemblance to a landmark and its
street address, the Philemon Russell House
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philemon_Russell_House>
on Russell Street in nearby Somerville:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/4229485792/>

Another sample is Elizabeth Bowen which was ranking well for
Attorneys in Miami, apparently because of being confused with the
novelist, Elizabeth Bowen
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bowen>
:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/4179312482/>

Note that for a brief while, the Elizabeth Bowen Wikipedia article
URL was the official website URL for this attorney, although it
appears to have been subsequently corrected.

The majority of cases involve articles about places which get
associated with business listings with the place name as part of the
business name. Another example of this is the Solomons Island Florist,
which is currently ranking very high for Florist searches in the
state of Maryland�apparently because of having Solomons as part of
the business name, which got it associated with the Solomons Wikipedia
article <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomons,_Maryland>
and it was also close in proximity to the geocode location in the
same article:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/4229656956/>

Solomons is a pretty remote place, compared to bigger cities like
Baltimore which probably have more popular florists to choose from�and
are much more user-friendly business locations for consumers from a
geographic accessibility viewpoint.

One last, amusing example is the Lowry Hill Law Office which is now
enjoying particularly high rankings for law firm, minneapolis
searches:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/4229675414/>

The business appears to have become entangled with the Wikipedia
article page about a highway tunnel, the Lowry Hill Tunnel
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowry_Hill_Tunnel>
due to closeness of name and proximity.

I did do some checking for more obvious potential name
mis-associations, such as businesses named after Benjamin Franklin,
Abe Lincoln, George Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr., but
I found no examples of those�indicating that Google Maps engineers
were perhaps aware of some of the more well-known names which have
been commonly used for businesses and which ought not to convey
popularity ranking weight and association with Wikipedia articles.
But, there are so many other bad associations with Wikipedia and
Panoramio content that really should have been caught prior to launch
of the new features.

All this goes to illustrate how the advent of PlaceRank as a stronger
influence within Google Maps has dramatically shuffled business
rankings. Some businesses which are perhaps the most-popular and
most-cost-effective for an area, have now been pushed out of the first
set of results for local searches, while some businesses which may not
merit the higher placement have suddenly rocketed into top slots.

I do think the concept of PlaceRank is moderately good, so long as
it's tempered a little by additional other ranking factors. Google
Maps is justified in conveying some amount of ranking weight, based
upon the popularity of a business's location, since convenient and
popular locations are more preferred by consumers. I just think that
the implementation here was somewhat faulty, and Google has been
overweighed the importance given to Wikipedia articles as a source for
PlaceRank data.

Sadly, examples like those I've shown above will likely result in
larger amounts of Wikipedia spam and will result in a number of
businesses attempting to break the Google Local Business Center rules
by adding more place names into their listing names. While I expect
Google Maps will perform more cleanup on misassociations like those
I've pointed out, and they'll likely do some tuning on the relative
weighting of the various local ranking factors, I am sure that
Wikipedia will continue to be an influencing factor within Maps from
here forward.

There are valid ways to optimize business listings through Wikipedia
which do not involve spamming nor breaking Wikipedia's guidelines, but
they require a greater degree of expertise and experience than most
SMBs have.

If you're interested in this, I suggest reading up on overall
PlaceRank, and I recommend Ash Nallawalla's excellent piece How to SEO
for Google PlaceRank
<http://www.netmagellan.com/google-placerank-in-the-wild-750.html>
.

I also intend to outline some of the ethical/valid means of
optimization through Wikipedia for local in upcoming articles here and
blog posts at SEMClubhouse.com <http://www.semclubhouse.com/>
. Meanwhile stay tuned as Google Maps will likely expand its data
sources for more information about places.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.

Chris Silver Smith <http://searchengineland.com/author/chris-smith/>

writes for the the Locals Only column at Search Engine Land. Chris
"Silver" Smith <http://silvery.com>
is director of optimization strategies for KeyRelevance
<http://www.keyrelevance.com>
.

<div><a href="http://www.superbhosting.net/"><img
src="http://www.searchmarketingnow.com/_images/superb.gif"
border="0"></a></div>
You are receiving this email because you subscribed to a Search Engine
Land, Search Marketing Now or Search Marketing Expo newsletter. To update
your subscriptions or unsubscribe, use your newsletter preferences page at
http://third.thirddoormedia.com/lists/?p=preferences&id=2&uid=f9779113b77d03598707df46ae032f9b.
Or send your written request to: 279 Newtown Tpke., Redding, CT
06896</font>

Effective Link Building Service

Monday, January 4, 2010

Locals Only: A New Behemoth Emerges In Google Maps: Wikipedia

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me