Stone is a Professional Website Design, Development, SEO and Interactive Marketing Services Company with headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
This morning Google announced that their Local Business Center is becoming Google Places. Essentially, it’s just the name catching up with the practice as the ‘place pages’ have been around for quite some time. The reasoning behind the change is sound:
Why? Millions of people use Google every day to find places in the real world, and we want to better connect Place Pages — the way that businesses are being found today — with the tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google.
They are also introducing some news features including the ability to specify service areas, a new way to advertise outside of the usual AdWords, free business photo shoots and real time update abilities.
One of the more interesting features is customized QR codes. Once a business creates their ‘place’ they can download a unique QR code. These codes can be placed on business cards, coupons and other marketing materials. When customers scan them with certain smartphones they are taken directly to the mobile version of that business’s Place Page. With the ability to customize your business’s Place Page with the latest news and offers this could be an extremely effective tool.
Of course, they offer the stellar tracking that Google programs have become known for. Data includes the usual, but useful, visitor and keyword tracking; along with what areas people traveled from to visit your business.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
There’s a great blog post (and subsequent comment discussion) happening over on the SEOMoz Blog today. The topic is one that all SEOs and webmasters have encountered at some point in time:
Why, oh why, has the Google God not smited my competitor who engages in obvious blackhat SEO practices?!?!
Google has been pretty aggressive about asking webmasters to report this evil behavior, and a few years ago were reasonably efficient at dealing out punishments. Unfortunately, the industry in general has noticed that Google’s Web Spam Team (not a deity after all) has not been taking action on these complaints anywhere near as often nowadays.
Frustrating to all us whitehat-ers? Absolutely. But it most likely isn’t indicative of Google having stopped caring, or in anyway condoning those practices as some have suggested.
Rand Fishkin goes through several potential reasons/causes behind this trend – all of which make a good deal of sense. Check out the post, it’s well worth a read.
We have to wonder though, spammers have been around since the beginning of teh interwebs – no matter what fix Google implements, won’t there just be a wave of human ingenuity poured into finding a way to beat the system? Is web spam ever a problem that can truly be solved? We’d love to hear your thoughts…
