Posts by Adam Wood

Google Local has been around for a while now and even with the increasing importance of local listings for businesses, it seems there may be some fault overlooked by Google in their algorithm.

Some local listings have been merged with old or incorrect information and displaying, in some cases, links to competitor’s websites. After doing some research, I found that the main cause of this was Google merging the listings of similar information from competitors and old directory listings such as phone numbers, addresses and product information, causing a reduction in traffic from localised searches. However, Google have stated that this is how their systems work, by design. So what can you do to resolve this issue?

First you will need to claim your local listing. There have been many cases where Google’s local listings have been claimed by competitors, resulting in lost traffic. It’s quite simple to claim your listing in Google, simply search for your business in Google Local and click the ‘More info > business owner > New listing’ links and enter your business information.

Google will then search to find your business, so click the ‘Claim Listing’ link to verify you are the business owner. You will need to enter a pin number which you can obtain by clicking the ‘verify’ link and Google will call you with a recorded message and the PIN or send a postcard through the post, to enter into the verification box to claim your listing.

The next stage is to claim or remove any duplicate listing under your account; this is just a simple case of going through each local business account and deleting any duplicated or incorrect accounts. This should remove the merged, duplicated accounts, however if this fails, you can contact Google through their support forums to remove the merged listings.

Adam Wood
ASP/SEO Programmer and Hosting Contact

Working as an SEO programmer, I come across many website that don’t use HTML or XML sitemaps. So, why are these important and what benefits do they have for your site?

XML sitemaps use an open standard format, intended to allow the search engines to crawl your site more easily. These sitemaps should contain the uniform resource locator (URL), the URL priority order, the change frequency to tell the search engines how often you update a particular page and the last mod date to tell the search engines the last time the sitemap was updated.

So, what if you already have a well structured site? Do you still need a sitemap? In short, yes. It’s always best to provide sitemaps to the search engines, as not only will it allow your site to be more easily crawled, the search engines don’t crawl every page of the site, so implementing a sitemap will increase the chances of the site being indexed more rigorously.

There are a few online tools to help in the creation of sitemaps, however since these resources will just crawl the site externally, it is best to check over the sitemap for duplicate URLs. For example, check out www.exmaple.com and www.example.com/index.html.

Adam Wood
SEO/ASP Programmer and Hosting Contact