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Mary, I really don't believe it's a relevancy improvement -- I think it's an error. For some types of searches, there might indeed be a slight difference if upper versus lower is used, particularly in brandnames. But, what I'm seeing is all over the board in terms of when it is affecting rankings -- doesn't appear to be tied to relevancy in my opinion.
Carrie -- I agree with you -- I think the majority of searchers use all lower-case, or if they are AOL users, perhaps they're in all upper-case {LOL!}.
Here's my image sharing sites chart that Carrie referenced, if you're looking for Flickr alternatives:
http://www.silvery.com/PhotoSharingComparison.html
(I haven't updated the chart in a few months, so you should double-check my notations if you use it.)
I'm sad that Flickr started Nofollowing, but, like Jill, I think that this is probably for the best overall. But, that doesn't negate the overall promotional worth one could get through ethical integration of images in Flickr, as I noted on my blog:
http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2008/02/21/flickr-starts-nofollowing/
My blog itself actually gets a significant percentage of traffic from Flickr since I've used so many pix hosted on Flickr to illustrate postings.
I don't believe Google intends to send any sort of message that it's okay to game Google Maps -- that would be contrary to all their messaging around guidelines.
Their intentions have clearly been two-fold: they wish to deliver a good consumer experience, and they originally desired to use physical street addresses for map location and update verification simultaneously.
From my perspective, it's possible to perform some types of owner verification/validation without displaying the addresses in the interface. With their moves to aggressively display more of their own local listings for web searches (they recently increased their local one-box listings from 3 to 10), I think it becomes more important for them to work out a method for displaying these business's listings along with others who have addresses.
Regarding webmasters who've spammed local listings in Google Maps, Mike Blumenthal and others have identified this sort of thing previously, and Google has always worked to revoke spammish listings when they become aware of them.
Some sort of malfunction is occurring -- I cannot reach the page via that link, in my IE browser. Also couldn't reach it through the hyperlink appearing in the right sidebar...
Story: Get A Free Link From Wired
Has Wired now deleted the page that Barry made? On this page:
it now says:
I guess the SEO usefulness is now a bit trashed. Is it yet another case of reporting on an advantage is nearly certain to make it disappear?deleting this page, 'its spam
on the comment about nofollow -- nofollow works for blog, but not for wikis where everyone is an editor
Daniel, that's great advice - keeping the description unique on each separate directory could help reduce chances of their listings getting supressed in SERPs due to duplication reduction efforts.
Updating core pieces of info like hours of operation and payment types can really help avoid customers getting nasty surprises later.
Thanks for commenting on the article.
These are all very good points, too, and quite interesting! I naturally agree that if you're not getting your money's worth from the advertising, you should drop it, no matter what the medium.
I suspect that different types of businesses may perform better or worse in both print and online yellow pages. For instance, I think that travel-related businesses may likely do a lot better online.
Restaurants might do very well in both online and offline -- loads of people still look at print YP in their hotel rooms when travelling, so it's possible that flashy (expensive!) ads in print YP for restaurants might perform very well.
Also, for some types of business, low referral rates might still not be a bad proposition for ROI. An attorney might only get a few phone calls from an ad, but if just one results in a million dollar fee, the attorney might well consider the ad costs to be worthwhile.
As LocalHound suggested, PPC might be a very good option -- assuming that some percentage of click-throughs should convert to actual sales, using PPC ads might be a way of limiting one's risk and helping to insure you get ROI for the ad cost.
I think that for designers it's okay to have a less-functional card, shapewise. For creative artists and designers, many of the standard business rules on formatting resumes, cards, and other collateral materials just don't apply, because they're judged a lot more on creativity and following the old standards would just work against them.
For everyone else, being able to carry the card easily along with many others one gets is vital.
You're right - we kept the headline trimmed to be slightly shorter, and that resulted in it being a bit confusing. I wasn't intending to suggest that Google searches for "yellow pages" should be taken as any sort of pulse for offline usage. The story was really intended to focus only on internet yellow pages usage.
I mentioned print directories near the begining, mainly because a number of analysts have opined that print references are on the decline as well, and the Google Trend graphs seemed to indicate that the online version of the traditional books could also be declining.
Some industry wags (and even Bill Gates) have said that the print yellow pages might go the way of the dinosaur within a decade. So, the forecasted demise of print is even further away than what the Google trendline indicates for online "yellow pages" at the moment.
I will say one thing about the YPA's reports on offline references holding strong: I'm thinking it quite possible that the surveying methodology could skew the numbers considerably in favor of strong print usage. I think some of that surveying is done by phone calls, and I think the phone numbers called are pulled from white pages directories. Many consumers have switched from landlines to cellphones, and when they did, they dropped landline service and dropped out of white pages directory listings. If that series of assumptions is correct, then the group being surveyed is comprised more of people who are slower adopters of technology rather than being representative samples of the overall population.
Regardless of surveying/accounting methodology, the offline, printed yellow pages directories are still used by a great many people, and are still highly valuable as a promotion vehicle for local businesses. Just as you recommend, I also believe that businesses should use a mix of offline and online channels.
Happy Birthday!
On the flip side of the coin, any thoughts on having one's birthdate and age made completely public?!? Sorta makes me want to go doublecheck all my various profile registrations to make sure that info is deleted.... mainly to safeguard from identity theft, but also for the sake of general avoidance of age prejudice and privacy...
At least according to the W3C Mobile Best Practices recommendation, one could use a mobile specific CSS, so larger images could be specified in the non-mobile CSS which would not be downloaded. Also, a number of sources recommend using style of display:none for larger images, although some are reporting that some handhelds will still download when display:none is used. The jury appears to be undecided in that issue, though.
I disagree about .mobi. I previously blogged about one or two things about .mobi rules that seemed really badly thought-out to me:
http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2006/06/20/mobi-top-level-domain-names-have-misguided-rules/
I've grown even more critical of the approach now, because the trend appears to be moving away from "special flavor" formats for mobile devices. Handhelds like the iPhone have made people desire even more to be able to view the same internet as what they find on their home PCs, and consumer demand for fast wireless data transfer has grown, too. Since terribly few websites support specialized mobile versions and since mobile devices are increasingly being built to automatically handle existing webpages to large degree, I think that going to the trouble of developing for .mobi is going to be a waste.
I think it's preferable to perform content negotiation where you sense the device type and deliver content accordingly.
Thanx, Matt!
Miriam: good questions! I think you have a good point - having that corporate address in all a site's footer pages, including store location pages, would likely be a little bit of a bad idea in this case.
I say that because the page would be slightly "muddier" from the perspective of the search engine. My recommendation about creating an individual profile page for every store location was done with the intention of making a page that's highly focused and specifically relevant to the particular address/city/state of that store, coupled with the company's brand name. Having an additional location address on the same page is just a bit detracting from this purpose, although I think the store locator pages could/would still likely perform very well for local search.
In the case you cite, I'd suggest the site use a different footer file for their store locator section in order to leave off the HQ address.
Most large companies aren't interested in driving lots of premise traffic to their headquarters building -- they're far more interested in driving the consumer traffic to their actual stores.
Yeah, I think the spelling is "tchotchkes". It's Yiddish for "trinket":
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Atchotchke
Actually - there are multiple, variant spellings, but I think "tchotchke" is the dominant one.
Say - thanx for the mention! Universal Search and the blending of vertical content into the traditional SERPs is indeed showing up on people's radar screens as significant. I though Greg Jarboe had some excellent commentary in the Universal Search presentation, and also the points made by Shari Thurow and Liana Evans on the Images & Search panel provided some great insights.
This is interesting news, though I believe the term for this type of advertising would be "interstitial ads", rather than "overlay ads".
Eeewww! "iPhone" and "Chocolate" sound so much better than "Goo"-anything!
I also have noticed an apparent preference in Google for Craigslist results and I had theorized in this Search Engine Land article that it was because so many in the San Francisco area like Craigslist:
http://searchengineland.com/070423-154346.php
The preference in Google SERPs for Craigslist pages could possibly indicate a bias by the Google engineers who live in the San Fran area, or it could indicate that some of their testing may have been biased by using too many quality evaluators in the San Fran area.
I'll give this a Sphinn, though it sounded as though we'll later lose the ego-links he's got to our blogs? Worthy of a Sphinn, regardless.
"...watch their referrer logs like hawks..." Yeah. I guess I resemble that remark!
Story: 14 Methods to Hide Text
Pointless to waste time on "testing" these, I would think, since Google's likely detecting and banning these methods now if they haven't already.
I don't consider what they're describing as truly "performance-based". They're just describing "pay for placement".
True performance-based SEO would be centered upon paying for qualified traffic, similar to paid-search campaigns.
My company has an actual performance-based finance model for SEO, for instance, and it doesn't "sell the Emporer's new clothes" as e:Visibility is describing. So, true Performance-Based SEO isn't always bad. It's very infrequent to find an SEO company which does it, however, because most are not willing to commit to that sort of accountability.
The conditional application of nofollow for distrusted/new versus those who are trusted would be way cool! I don't need to tell you, but you naturally shouldn't share what your criteria/algo is for allow vs nofollow!
Story: More Searches Including Local/Travel Turning Case-Sensitive in Google