Can Location Information Decrease National Search Volume ?

[JustDucky]

Has anyone observed the effect on G organic traffic when a site which has little or no location information suddenly registers with the reputable "local" directories?

I am especially curious about results observations based upon G's behavior during the past several months.

It might be a hosting problem (the host is performing some non-routine mantenance) or possibly even a HUGE change in G's algo but I've observed a huge drop in my traffic after claiming a couple of the local listings earlier this week.  Until then, I doubt G had associated my site with my city.

A couple of other explanations are possible but the timing leaves me to doubt it's a coincidence.

T.I.A.

[BedeFahey]

Just throwing out some thoughts here...

Is it possible that your claiming the local directory listing propagated a duplicate listing to a major platform (e.g. Superpages > Google) which busted your clickthrough rate?

Or was the traffic coming in from national search queries and not local ones? Any discernible rankings drop, or traffic loss to a keyword group?

Google's Venice update, maybe? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

I've seen some local companies start to rank for non-geographic search terms due to this update.  Because local companies are ranking, non-local companies have been bumped down the list.

Decent post on that here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update

[MiriamEllis]

Hi JustDucky,

I've been working in Local for 5+ years and yours is a question I have seen asked frequently, but for which I have never seen an official study performed, the question being: does being local make you less national. All of the informal discussions I've ever had on this topic indicated a big no on this. Local is better thought of as an addition to your traditional, national SEO, rather than a detractor from it. So, my guess is that your ranking drop is unrelated to you claiming local listings (most of which take more than a couple of days to go into effect and ripple out onto the wider web anyway).

I do know that there have been some big changes reported recently...potentially an algo shakeup of some kind that has nothing to do with Local. I'm going to ask one of our expert traditional SEOs to pop by this thread to help you investigate possibilities for your loss of traffic. I would be very surprised if the local listings had anything to do with this. Hang in there!

Miriam

[Dr-Pete]

Miriam has a much better head for local than I do, but my sense of recent local updates (like "Venice") is the same as hers. If Google starts to treat a SERP as local, then being seen as local should help you and being seen as may hurt you. On average, I think we're seeing more SERPs being treated as having local intent, so generally getting Google to locate you should be a positive. Of course, for any given keyword, there could be exceptions (especially if you get a huge amount of traffic from a few broad, "head" terms).

Hosting issues can always cause short-term problems, and there have been a lot of shake-ups in the algorithm recently. Google is probably testing over-optimization updates (not full roll-outs, but we're seeing weird things happening), and they had a glitch on 4/17 that shook up some sites. They've also been hitting link networks hard, but I find it hard to believe that a handful of reputable local directories would be impacted by that. If you built up 100s of low-quality directory links and doubled your link profile in the process, that could be trouble. Adding a couple of directories to a solid profile should pose no risk.

My gut reaction is that there's more going on here than just local factors.

[JustDucky]

Panda 3.5 and Penguin as it turned out.  You and Miriam were spot on.

THX to both of you.

[MiriamEllis]

Thanks for following up, JustDucky.