Check-in and get high?

Do you think its an invitation for a party? Oh no. Google has just confirmed a brand new Panda update. Google announcing 40 search updates. So a lot of things are going on at Google.

The lastest Panda update is making the search ranking more accurate and sensitive to recent changes on the web. So its still great with fresh content. It was the same with the Panda 3.2 update. I hope you all make people comment on your pages – right?

But I will tell a little about local search ranking. Google has done some improvements to ranking for local search results. (launch code-name “Venice”). This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

You can read and listen about how local search ranking works on Google’s blog her.

Google are telling that they use – Relevance, Prominence and Distance for their local search ranking.

If you have a business you can’t do much about the distance factor. Its all relative to the geographical place of the searchers. Regarding relevance you can only do very little. You must of course use your main keywords on your website and online profiles and remember to select the right business categories. Read my article about Free advertising on Google here.

So now what about prominence? The question is how is Google measuring this. When Foursqure was getting hot – both Facebook and Google started to use the same kind of check-in. Google is constantly chasing signals from the users to find the most relevant websites for its users and check-in is surdenly a factor where the users and tell a different. In 2009 Google rolled-out their check-in service Latitude. And they continued to imitate Foursquare. And Google has a lot of bots that it uses for spying pages – so they can also very easy get the number of check-ins from both Foursquare and Facebook.

But its still a secret from Google if Check-in is a local search ranking factor. But if I was a local business owner I would certainly get everybody to check in at my place. Why not give a dime in discount if people check-in at your coffeshop?

Wishing you all the best…

Henrik