Google Venice update and Local Search

Here at Rocktime we do love Local, and usefully for us and our clients, Google loves Local too. The Google Venice update in February sees a few tweaks to search engine rankings which can be summed up in the following;

• Local results will be more heavily favoured in search rankings

• Local results will now be ranked higher for broad search terms

• Google now returns the searcher more relevant, specific, personalised results relating to the location.

Since the Panda update almost a year ago, there are three other significant Google updates worth being aware of;

In August 2011, Caffeine was initiated in order to create a faster, more accurate indexing and search system and to better handle rich media and real-time content.

November 2011 saw the release of Fresh which enhanced the importance of adding new fresh content to a web site and was largely about chronological order of content. Google Fresh acted to give more weight to websites producing new content than ones that haven’t produced a new page or post in years.

Most recently in January 2012, Google released Search plus Your World (SpYW), which you can read about on our own article about the SpYW launch. In brief this update increased the importance of social content in searches, as well as additionally prioritising Google’s own social network site, Google+, in search results.


Author: Alice Cheetham