Having to search online for local businesses is becoming a right pain-in-the ass, especially if you have a local business in Irvine Scotland that is. It’s got to the stage where I just couldn’t hold back anymore and sent a letter to the local press, see what happens with it …

Here’s what I sent :

I’m not 100% sure if anyone within your office follows what the search engine Google. But lately there has been an influx of american .com websites invading our own google.co.uk data centre.

Anyway to cut a long story short, Google have basically placed more emphasis for the .com sites and when do a ‘local search’ within Google, outwith the Google Map Pack of sites, normally located at the top of the page, the organic listings is littered with businesses from Irvine, CA, US.

Why is this important, well try a few examples and you’ll see…

plumber Irvine
painter Irvine
electrician irvine
gas engineers irvine
car mechanic irvine
hairdresser irvine

etc…

Not exactly local listings and not very helpful for local businesses when Google crunches local businesses for a local search query into a ten pack map search.

Just thought you might like to know how Google is treating local businesses in Irvine.

All the best,

Paul

Small businesses are being treated as a joke, if you think getting listed in the ten pack map search at the top of the page is hard, then think again, it is easy to abuse and spam.

I had to laugh a few days ago when Google’s most famous engineer produced his latest blog post about page rank sculpting : PageRank sculpting : where Matt went into blog mode to inform webmasters and site optimisers why Google has binned the use of the ‘No Follow’ attribute.

The things that gave me the belly laugh was Matt’s comments about why, SEO’s (Search Engine Optimisers) failed to notice – for over a year – that Google had scrapped the use of ‘No Follow’ for page sculpting. TBH, I never noticed, and I’ll bet that 99.9% of those involved within the industry never noticed either.

So, you can bet Matt, had a massive giiggle to himself when he was penning his post as he not only mentioned it once but twice …

At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t.

In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise.

You wonder what else Matt has up-his-sleeve, that affords himself a good giggle at a webmaters/SEO’s lack of awareness. It does make you wonder and once again drives home the fact that we are all playing catch-up as to what Google requires for a site to rank well within their search engines. And that, for many, is no laughing matter.