Forum Moderators: open
Simple example:
Los Angeles International Airport is in Inglewood, CA. If you look on a map, it's on the left side, way on the lower bottom of the huge area that is Los Angeles. Inglewood is PART of Los Angeles, which is HUGE, but does not have Los Angeles address for businesses located there. Nor do any of the other multiple "cities" which are actually part and parcel of Los Angelse, and even have their own reps on our Los Angeles City Council - but have addresses that seem to indicate otherwise to anyone who doesn't know better.
The very small part of Los Angeles, the part of Los Angeles that would actually have a Los Angeles address, is in reality more toward downtown, which (to keep things simple) is on the upper right hand side of the map. Only about 10-15% of what's really in Los Angeles actually has a Los Angeles post office address.
SOOO.. if you live in Inglewood (bottom left on the map, remember?) and need someone to walk your dog while you're away or at work, and do a search for dog-walkers in the Los Angeles area, for which you will pay dog-walking and travel time, you definitely do NOT want a dog-walker who lives in "Los Angeles" which by the search engine (Google in this case) would give you dog-walkers near downtown. THAT is how they're doing it, folks!
For mercy's sake, you'd pay the dog-walker for a half hour to walk your dog, and 3 hours travel time from downtown to Inglewood in traffic on our freeways to get to your house and back in traffic!
There are multiple "post office addresses" that actually represent areas within big cities that do NOT appear to be within those cities if you look at their U.S. Post Office addressing protocol, but most assuredly ARE in the city.
The whole concept of "Local Search" will be BROKE until this issue is addressed. Or else it will force legit businesses to have to pay for phonied up addresses and zip codes to satisfy search engines whose algorithmic search is pitifully ignorant of local taxomony.
Kaled.
The only way local search could ever work reliably would be if every site/page included a geolocation tag.
Mmmmmm... Spam... :)
Get a proxy IP at h**p://www.stayinvisible.com and insert into the Tools > Options > Connections > LAN box on IE
>>>Mmmmmm... Spam... :)
That'd be a terrible thing to do ;)
Don't worry too much about local search. No one uses it anyway. It won't ever get used by the general public. The general public uses the default search. Local search is just another Goofy Google PR stunt.
With the utmost of respect, I have to most emphatically disagree. Given that all the search engines have enough demographic data to be able to discern the value of "local search," I believe we're safe in assuming that searchers do indeed name locations in their searches.
In the interest of properly serving the needs of webmasters who operate at the local level, please don't state that in such absolute terms, because it's simply inaccurate.
People do indeed search for products - and most especially, for services - at the local level.
When Terry Semel of Yahoo revealed in an interview many months ago, that there would be an emphasis placed on local search, I believe it's safe to assume he was basing it on hard facts and ostensibly on data that they had available to them, and not just blowing it out his ears.
Local search is now upon us if we can discern the blowing of the wind, and I think it's safe to assume will play more of a role in future; so it behooves us to start thinking of how we're to deal with the issue, given the limitations and ramifications we're quite likely to be facing.
The problems of Google's local search Marcia outlines so well is an opportunity for many of us. Add to it what Yahoo is trying, and all of the Yellow Pages on the web, and you've got a situation where serious marketers on the local scene would appreciate a helping hand.
You just need better clarification of where the user is interested in (maps help) and what area the documents being searched cover (better metadata helps).
Businesses have been doing this in the yellow page directories for years.
Any self-respecting Inglewood dog walkers should have the keyword "Inglewood", probably in addition to "Los Angeles", on their Web pages. This seems to be a matter of including effective keywords as well.
Not necessarily, but if you're a dog-walker in Inglewood, maybe you'd better think twice about having it in your domain name. ;)
Not necessarily. If any site or major site section is given just one combination of targeted country, town tag and anti-spam filters would slam sites that use more than a couple within one domain...that might work with some more tweaking.
Easier still: TLD's in combination with zip code and spam filtering...think about it.
E.g. widgets.de.79**** (size of areas tb determined with type of zip denomination, targeting).
Of course I'd get useless SERPs if I searched "dog-walkers Michigan". People in the LA area need to somehow narrow down the search. And if you think Google should change, then what is that change you'd make at Google?
The whole concept of "Local Search" will be BROKE until this issue is addressed.
I would have to agree that it is broken in certain metropolitan areas, but lets face it, the whole idea of those areas is broken anyway. New York is probably even worse with all the City/State confusion when people are searching. We don't even need to get into the buroughs.
It is just like some of the areas in the main search. Google is not broken, but with every update there are areas in the search that are broken. Los Angeles may be broken, but the metro area a few hundred miles north doesn't have the same problems. Their cities and towns all go by their own name. Same thing when you get up to Portland and Seattle.
Down in Texas, aren't some of the cities something like 100 miles across between their city limit signs? And that's without having cities within the city.
But I also have to say that it has worked wonderfully well for me here in Olympia Washington. I have used it to find feed stores and auction houses in nearby towns. As long as it is useful for much of the population, then it is not broken.
