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