Mercurythread » google local http://www.mercurythread.co.uk The personal website of Michael Briggs : Professional SEO and Internet Geek Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:31:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Another example of Google Local being rubbish http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/google-local-is-rubbis/2010/01/ http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/google-local-is-rubbis/2010/01/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:16:55 +0000 Michael http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/?p=226 It is to Google eternal disservice that the local results for queries delivers such utter rubbish within its result set – too much rubbish. People who are not helping me get to useful data filling up the entire system or trying to get affiliate commissions just wasting what can be a really useful service.
I’ve just been looking for a “hotel in ascot”, fancied a wee trip down to watch some horses and the result set for the ‘one box’ component is awful.

  1. De Vere Venues Sunningdale Park and Maxdonald Berystede – going to a government site. Whats wrong with the hoteliers site. And is the other Sunningdale Park listed with marker “B” not the same hotel
  2. “This is berkshire” does not seem the right website to feature the Ramada Plaza – why doesn’t the link go to the hotel (which is also listed in the further result set)

My general gripe is that the results are not showing the people who own the businesses do not feature even for their own hotels – the results are spammed. The results may not be useless – as the pages you end up on contain information. But they are certainly not useful.

For the next couple of weeks I’m going to hack through Google Local and see what if anything can be done to these sorts of rubbish results to make them better.

]]> http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/google-local-is-rubbis/2010/01/feed/ 0