Correction: we probably got the click radius density classes wrong
A few people reached out after the click radius post. Two of them had a different interpretation of the DensityClass enum that we think is probably right.
Read more →Independent analysis of local ranking signals found in Google's leaked Content Warehouse documentation.
A few people reached out after the click radius post. Two of them had a different interpretation of the DensityClass enum that we think is probably right.
Read more →We spent the last four months going through the leaked Google API documentation, specifically the local-related modules. This is a write-up of what we found and what happened when we tested it.
Read more →The conventional understanding is relevance, distance, prominence. But the leaked code suggests the "relevance" part is more granular than just matching a query to a GBP category.
Read more →NavBoost has been the most discussed part of the leaked documents. But how it works for local search specifically hasn't gotten much attention. We found a set of proto definitions that reference geographic coordinates alongside click metrics.
Read more →GBP photos have always been a "best practice" thing. But I found a proto message that evaluates recency, diversity, and the ratio of customer vs owner photos.
Read more →Google isn't treating all citation sources equally. There's a structure that assigns different weights to different source types: first-party, aggregator, directory, social.
Read more →I found a field called review_velocity_decay in what looks like a local quality scoring module. The name is pretty self-explanatory, but the structure around it is more interesting than I expected.
Read more →Like everyone else in this industry, I've been aware of the leaked Google API documentation since May. I do local SEO for a living, and almost nobody is talking about the local-specific parts.
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