Major Google Update

Whooa big change today. On Wednesday our Head of Development Jine, noticed that the “places” menu item had disappeared from Google. This is a capture from my video of April 16.

It was there on Wednesday morning as well as we use it a lot to edit and find clients places listings quickly. Then in the afternoon. Boom! Gone.

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Today’s SEO Ranking Reports.

We check our clients rankings everyday. We like to know what Google is up to on a daily basis. Today is BIG. We have had some of our major clients jump into top 3 spots from outside the top 50 for single highly competitive keyword. Jine came in excitedly and explained about one client we were having trouble with had moved onto the front page.. then another. I said to her, Google has updated. There has been a change. She agreed and then we got to work on the parallels between the clients that had all jumped onto the front page for highly competitive phrases. We realised they were all already ranking for their main keyword + Melbourne. So “blue widgets Melbourne” if you like but the keyword without Melbourne was nowhere to be found. Then Nick one of our First Year SEOs, said, “They’ve replaced places for organic…” I quickly asked them to test the theory. Check clients in other states and cross reference where the addresses are. Sure enough he was right… kind of. Our clients are now ranking for single competitive keywords that Google was ignoring if they have an address in the city where the search is being done!!

More to follow.

We’re not sure who the losers are at this stage, all we know is that our clients are winners. There will be more to come on this but I would love to know what you are seeing. I said a few weeks back I thought there was a big change coming. Didn’t expect this though.

UPDATE

Seeing some major losers here, Beacon lighting has been hit, looks like Woolworths Money as well.