Google “Pigeon” Updates Local Search Algorithm With Stronger Ties To Web Search Signal

Google has released a new algorithm to provide a more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. The changes will be visible within the Google Maps search results and Google Web search results.

Note: We’ve named this update the Pigeon update.

The core changes are behind the scenes, but it does impact local search results rankings and some local businesses may notice an increase or decrease in web site referrals, leads and business from the change.

Google told us that the new local search algorithm ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search along with search features such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms and more.

In addition, Google said that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.

The new algorithm is currently rolling out for US English results and aims to provide a more useful and relevant experience for searchers seeking local results. Google didn’t share any details about if and when the update would roll out more widely in other countries and languages.

Google has not commented on the percent of queries impacted by this algorithm update, nor if certain web spam algorithms were deployed in this update.

If you have noticed any ranking changes and referral changes for your local business, please let us know in the comments.

Social Media On Off-Page SEO

The first and foremost priority of Google is to provide quality content to its searchers. And the best feature of a quality content is that it gets shared more. Search engines like Google take social signal as an important metric for ranking web pages.

Make profiles for your blog or business website on social networks so that you can stay connected with your users and visitors socially. When you grow a strong social community making your content go viral becomes a lot easier. You just have to share your web page’s link with your followers and the rest is done by them. If you write really great and compelling content it will get shared more and hence increase its chances of getting better rank in search results.

Engagement with your social community is a very important aspect when you want your social community to share your content virally. So try to provide as much value you can to your followers so that they are loyal to you and love to share your content.

Social bookmarking is also a great way to do off-page SEO for your web pages. There are hundred of social bookmarking sites that help users bookmark your web page if they liked it. If your web page gets bookmarked more it sends good signals to search engines that your content is great and should be ranked higher.

You can also bookmark your own web pages using tools like Social Poster or Social Marker to bookmark them over a large number of social bookmarking sites. It saves you a lot of time as it semi-automates the process of bookmarking and you also don’t need to wait to for others to bookmark your page for you to tell Google about it.