Top 2 Things I hate About Google Right Now

You may remember we were the first SEO team in the world to detect the so called Google “Phantom” update that occurred in Australia on May 3, 2013. Since then we have seen a lot of ecommerce sites badly affected by this change. The changes mainly affected when and how Google + Local results were displayed. Then yesterday, I caught up with a viewer/client who showed me something Google were trialling with adwords/product listings and quite frankly I find it quite disturbing. I haven’t thoroughly researched any Google announcements around it yet so I would like your feed back.

1. Google + Local (aka Google Places)

The results we are now seeing for searches that would commonly be associated with users looking for ecommerce sites seem to include a lot of Google local results. If you only have one address or work from home with your ecommerce site you were probably hit with a downgrade in your ranking everywhere except where your office is. This is dumb. Dumb for the user and really horrible for the ecommerce site. Take the search “flowers”. In Australia we get over 40,000 searches a month for this phrase.I know this from doing SEO on flowers sites. We used to have flower etailers at the top of search, now we get bricks and mortar florists none of which are close by. If I was looking for a florist I’d type in “florist” followed by where I wanted to find that florist. Broad category seaches like these are those that have been hit the hardest. Thankfully we have found an SEO solution for our clients in this predicament but there are thousands of businesses out there who are hurting and they have not broken Google’s TOS. For the record, we do not currently have a client in the flowers category. All the results below are Melbourne based but I’m 20km from the Melbourne CBD

2. And of course there is.. Google + Local (aka places)

This is the Google + Local beta trial I find really disturbing.

. I haven’t read much about this but it looks as though the adwords data will be coming form Merchant centers. How Google intend to roll this out is not clear. You will see from the above example that Google is using the Local listings to put advertising around it that is not related to the business listing itself. To me this seems very un-google like. Over the last ten years or so I have defended Google’s updates but this one seems… well… icky. Is it just me? Watch the video above to see how you get this search.

I would love your feedback on this. Are you seeing this elsewhere? What do you think about it?