Google Catastrophe!

Jonathan R. Walcher · September 10, 2009

The Google gods have done something terrible. If you do a search in any other city for "city name photographer" you get a list of local businesses and the corresponding search results.

Look what you get when you do you search for "Oklahoma City Photographer"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGGL_en___US339&hs=NXH&q=oklahoma+city+Photographer&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1

Only one business listing...how can this be?:scratch

This happened within the past 72 hours.

Anyone have any suggestions? Ever seen this before?

Blaker · September 10, 2009

Jonathan R. Walcher wrote:

The Google gods have done something terrible. If you do a search in any other city for "city name photographer" you get a list of local businesses and the corresponding search results.

Look what you get when you do you search for "Oklahoma City Photographer"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGGL_en___US339&hs=NXH&q=oklahoma+city+Photographer&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1

Only one business listing...how can this be?

This happened within the past 72 hours.

Anyone have any suggestions? Ever seen this before?

Is this what you're looking for?
About 4 listings down on the google page you linked to is the entry "Oklahoma City Photographers" and you click on it you get this list:

http://www.decidio.com/local-businesses/photographers-oklahoma%20city-oklahoma-s53.html

Art Scott · September 11, 2009

I see a whole page of Ok City and surrounding area photogs listed......
Results : Results 1 - 10 of about 33,100,000 for oklahoma city Photographer.

also included a google map showing one location.......

and the prob is???????

Jonathan R. Walcher · September 11, 2009

More examples
Here are the results returned when you do a search for photographers in some other major cities....

Austin Photographer

Tulsa Photographer

New York Photographer

Los Angeles Photographer

Notice that there is a list of many different "Local Business Results" for photographers near that city...my city used to be the same...and my listing was within the top 5 for years. I got lots of traffic from that alone. In google analytics...the keywords oklahoma city photographer have been the top driving force to my site forever.

Now...there isn't a list...it's just one photographer. I noticed Dallas TX has the same issue....it didn't used to be like this. Just wondering if anyone new what might be up and if they had run into the same problem. I guess the main issue is I see the affect in analytics and it's pretty drastic.

Dallas Photographer

David_S85 · September 11, 2009

Funny thing is, that linking all these city photog links again in here is actually creating even more links at google and other search engines and thereby causing more of a problem in finding a photog in those cities.

Case in point, as pretty much the lead guy here in deleting spam at DGrin, I see quite a few SEO spam (Search Engine Optimization) attempts with all those very cities in particular linked at the bottom of posts, which explains why there are 32 million links found for 0k1ah0ma alone. There is a very active spamming enterprise in the far east promoting those certain city sites, many of them I would not trust doing business with.

Jonathan R. Walcher · September 12, 2009

I think I figured it out -
Ok...so here's a word from someone who didn't read Google's Guidelines. There are a few of them...but there are the #2 and #3 rules:

Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords into the title field, and do not include phone numbers or URLs in the title along with your proper business name.

I broke the rules by including the City Name in my listing to improve my results. It's the only reason I can figure why I got moved down to the bottom of the list.

Lesson learned. :cry

Google Catastrophe!

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