After constantly drilling home the point to Google about the lack of potential for small firms with small budgets to compete with the large budget firms – they are finally attempting to address the issue
Sometimes those posts were heated and the exchanges rude – even to the point of being banned from one blog. But this does show that persistence can affect the policies of even the largest most powerful companies when you have a point and are tenacious about advocating it – and NOT let the reactions of others affect you.
After two years of about 100 controversial posts and lecturing Google via several of their blogs -....
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/traffic-power-ceo-in-jail/#comment-120190
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/#comment-110764
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/comments-on-our-webmaster-guidelines/#comment-107301
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/by-the-way-2/#comment-101589
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html#c7947858263582139535
this is what they just did......
http://www.freezepage.com/1201782931YAFHVJYYXO
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Travel+Agencies+NY&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=security+guards+Chicago+IL&btnG=Search
This of course, is not what was meant, but perhaps this is the best they could do to even up the playing field. This is still a band-aid approach. The organics are still biased and not all companies have local listings. But they now understand the dilemma and have empathy
So now, on a standard 1027 X 768 screen resolution, you will mostly see the local listings first. The sponsor links are on the right side but not on the top. These results will only appear with detailed City specific searches with the exception of NY |
Yes, and they do it globally, in Germany too. |
Google is now showing Traffic STATS just for the local listing.
Similar to the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard – but just for the local listings.
This offers a good way for webmasters to compare their traffic from both resources |
