This post was mentioned on Twitter by shagunvatsa: New Blog Post: Google’s Recent Changes to its Local Algorithm – http://tinyurl.com/yap3z9u...

This has been a huge blow to us and it’s frustrating, but understandable, because of how easy it was to manipulate Google local.

I have guessed that there was an over-customization penalty, so i began scaling everything back, but it is definately frustrated when you have put so much time to optimizing 50-100 listings and it all has to be reversed and changed.

That’s the life of SEO though…if things don’t change, we don’t have to figure them out.

My listings are still better than where they were before, but i am 100% positive that it’s not an algorithm doing the penalties, etc. If you search major keywords in large us cities especially, they are manually ordered…which is frustrating to say the least.

Hopefully the penalties are temporary and if we are “good” then they will update with the introduction of a better algorithm (probably based more upon natural search results. )

For example, I have been helping an upholstery business rank on Google Local. I have been submitting their information to a number of local directories (the ones mentioned by Mihm/Blumenthal, etc.) and it has been over 4 months since I started doing this and only one of the citations (from superpages) has been picked up by Google.

I suggested that the client ask their customers to review them on Google, they sent out an email to their best customers, and so far have had six great reviews. None of the other websites have any reviews.

From the start I also checked the most searched keywords for their location (ex: san fransisco upholstery, san fransisco window treatments) and used those as the categories.

They were ranking around the middle of the 10 pack now, with all of Google’s tweaking, they aren’t showing.

Meanwhile another upholsterer has shot up out of nowhere and is ranking first using keyword spam in their business name field…
There business name field is actually

“[biz name] Upholstery ( Window Treatments, Foam, Blinds, Furniture Repair)”

And from their site footer I can see that Yellowpages.com is doing their internet spam “marketing”

I have submitted them as spammers to Google for what that is worth…

An SEO from Vancouver replied on another of Mike’s post you mentioned elsewhere and said something that I hope Google will do in the future:

Why doesn’t Google simply eliminate keywords in the company name as a ranking factor? That would eliminate any incentive to do so.

What do you think? I wonder if Google will do this and I hope that they do because really it should not be a factor in my [possibly wrong] opinion.

It doesn’t make sense to me that a company should have extra “SEO juice” just because they put the name of their service or city as part of their incorporated business name.
That just penalises companies unique enough to not use a generic name.

Thanks for your comments. How close your business is to the downtown core of a city is definitely an important ranking factor. If I were in you, I would think of creative ways in which you can change the location of your client. In the meantime, you might find it useful to refer to David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors. This survey will give you an in depth knowledge of the criteria with respect to their influence on ranking factors in Google and Yahoo maps.

Has you local business listing account been banned? If so, get in touch and I can definitely help you get your listing back up.