OK, obviously I pay attention to where I stand organically and I was paying close attention to my local business center results as well. On Nov. 5 I commented on a post by Matt McGee about how all of our local listings were gone. They were for about a day, but all of them came back except for searches related to “Sarasota SEO”, “Sarasota Internet Marketing” and “Sarasota Web Design”.
I started searching nationwide and saw that in other major cities there were no LBC listings for SEO, Internet Marketing or Web Design. I thought I would give it a month and see if it was a glitch, but guess what? Nope. They still aren’t there. I have some pics as examples. As of today I searched for each term- SEO, Internet Marketing and Web Design – with the following cities and received no local business center results – Dallas, New York, Scranton, Topeka, Tampa, Sarasota and Los Angeles. I know that Google was suspending accounts for those that had keywords in the business name (I did as well). I changed mine immediately, I was never told my account was suspended, but I am gone as are all of my competitors.
So are we being punished for being in this industry? Where did we go? I see other businesses coming up, just not this industry. I also see in my LBC stats that someone is clicking on my link, but I can’t seem to find how they found me. What is up Google? More Google Weird day to come…
Given this topic, I thought you’d want to read something related:
http://www.seobook.com/google-hypocritical-importance-privacy
RT @tweetmeme Where did the SEO’s Go in Local Business Center? – SEO Aware http://bit.ly/6nfgjk
[...] Google Admits to Taking SEO’s out of Local Business Center As Search Engine Roundtable reported this morning, Google admits to removing SEOs and Web Designers from the local business listings. Obviously this bothers me a bit. We discussed seeing this on 12-14-09 in our entry “Where did the SEO’s go?” [...]
RT @tweetmeme Where did the SEO’s Go in Local Business Center? – SEO Aware http://bit.ly/6nfgjk