Why search engines need to crack geo-targeted searches

I think search engines increasingly have a problem on their hands from sophisticated affiliate sites which are dominating the natural search results to the increasing frustration of searchers.

I recently experienced this myself. I was looking for a florist in Hertford. Not a florist who could deliver to Hertford but one actually in Hertford.

So I searched Google.co.uk (for UK pages only) on florists in Hertford.

It’s not until page three that there are any results which aren’t middleman / affiliate sites, and even then its a local directory not the actual florists themselves. By comparison I found what I wanted in 1 click on yell.com.

Looking at all the affilate sites whose pages contained ’Florists in Hertford’, or whose URLs contained this search string, it appeared almost as if the sites had dynamically created themselves to suit my search string. Unless I’m much mistaken this is not possible. So what they must be doing is just auto-generating thousands of variations of their web pages and inserting different search strings each time so the sites will come for whichever town name you search on ’Florist in [XYZ]’.

That’s clever SEO on the part of those sites but usually not much good to searchers or the search engines. For any product / service that I’m after which is localised and where the provider is unlikely to have a search-optimised web presence (e.g. plumbers, pest control people, drain unblockets etc. etc.) then I’m now inclined to avoid search engines and go for a directory like yell.com.

The problem is not just one of geo-targeting but also that many of the providers of services/products that you are after may not actually have a web presence - again this plays to the advantage of someone like The Yellow Pages where the basic online listing (free as part of a print listing) is essentially a micro-site.

The above kinds of scenarios also point to the eminent sense in Findwhat.com’s new Pay-Per-Call service.

It will be interesting to see how the search engine vs. directories vs. classifieds environment shakes down over time as the lines are increasingly blurred.

Getting a site listed on DMOZ has benefits a site ranking on Google (and other search engines too, I suspect). This because webmasters use scripts to list all or part of the DMOZ directory on their site, and this in turn boosts a site's Page Rank.

DMOZ is worthwhile. Directories that are free to get listed on are worthwhile too. Niche ones are worth investing in (eg www.find.co.uk) and Yahoo! Directory would be too if it were cheaper.

Lawrence

The problem with google is its Page Rank system.

I did a little experiment a few months ago and added a link to every page on our sites men to an affilate mobile tones website that we got set up by a comany.

The link title is "Mobile: Tones & Graphics" and the url is http://tones.sportnetwork.net

A quick search for Mobile Tones on google:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Mobile+Tones

The page is number 2 on google, the only reason this will be is because according to googles back link checker it has about 2,400 links pointing to it. In reality it probably has well over 100,000 links.

I did no SEO work on the page just added a link and within a few weeks I am number 2 on google for a very good keyword search.

So in theory its very easy to get to the top of google if you have the numbers of pages, and a quick script using affilate links for content could easliy be done as ashley found out.

Google are not stupid and know this, in my opinion they are not that willing to change this as it increases the clicks on the paid for placments. But that is just my opinion....;-)