Google Abbreviations for State, City, and County Names

[kennydubose]

Does anyone have evidence of whether or not Google's search algorithm recognizes abbreviations such as:

Statenames (TX for Texas)
Citynames (LA for Los Angeles)
County (Co. for County)
Zipcode (ZIP for Zipcode)

Is there a source for an "official" list of recognized abbreviations?

[piatkow]

I believe that state abbreviations are owned by the USPS. Other codes, such as country and currency codes are owned by a variety of organisations including of course ISO.

[tedster]

City nicknames would fall under Google's semantic analysis. The more commonly used, the more likely they would be picked up. If in doubt, I'd play around with search results to see how well the nickname you're concerned with is doing.

[LifeinAsia]

I think it may also depend on your location. For example, if you search for "LA plumbers" from California, you'll probably get results for plumbers in Los Angeles. But if you do the same search in New Orleans, you may get plumbers in Louisiana. (I'm in California, so I can't verify this. Can anyone else try?)

[Robert Charlton]

Does anyone have evidence of whether or not Google's search algorithm recognizes abbreviations such as...

It depends on what you mean by "recognize". While Google probably makes the association between commonly used abbreviations and what they stand for, Google appears always to favor a literal match.

So, if you're asking: "If I use 'TX' on a page, will Google treat that the same as if I'd used 'Texas'?"... in my experience the answer is no. If I were targeting, say, a business in Somewhere, Texas, I'd strain to get both 'TX' and 'Texas' on the page. Ditto with 'LA' vs 'Los Angeles'.

Conceivably, if you got down to a choice among not-very-many pages, Google might allow, say, the page containing the abbreviation rather than the actual word (or vice versa, depending on what was searched) to rank instead of the precise search, but I've never seen that happen.

Heavy inbound linking for alternative terms could of course change this.