Local Enhancements

[mike]

In an article by Tara Calishain this morning I read where Google has made a few upgrades/changes to it's local search. Pick what you're looking for and where you want to find it and away you go. The results page has a nifty map that allows you to zoom in/out actually see where the things you're looking for are located.

I am all about local search. To me local search is the next good step forward for search engines. If Buck Rogers uses a search engine in the 25th century I bet it has a good local search.

[sarahk]

This post differs from the newsletter item:

I am think about using a div tags to create hidden layers on product pages. I am afraid that SEs might consider this spamming.

When the page first appears the product "description" is visible to the user. I use an onClick command to change the visibility of the layers to show "specs" or "links". All the hidden layers are available to the end user.

So, are SEs going to consider this spamming?
Will the SEs even see the text in the hidden layers?...

Be careful how you do it but a little experiment of mine shows it works and is currently allowed

http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/layers.php

In the Layers Discussion which starts life hidden I have some keywords highlighted. I won't put them here incase it messes with the results in the future. At the moment my page is the only page which is returned for the keywords.

So it works... just be honest about whether you are using it as a trick or because it genuinely helps your site deliver it's information.

Sarah

[Mel]

Originally Posted by Mike

In an article by Tara Calishain this morning I read where Google has made a few upgrades/changes to it's local search. Pick what you're looking for and where you want to find it and away you go. The results page has a nifty map that allows you to zoom in/out actually see where the things you're looking for are located.

I am all about local search. To me local search is the next good step forward for search engines. If Buck Rogers uses a search engine in the 25th century I bet it has a good local search.

Well it seems to me that depends a lot on what you are searching for.

If you are searching for pizza then by all means you want someplace local that can deliver it while its still hot, but if you are looking to buy software delivered online, then IMO the location has no bearing whatever and local search may in fact counterproductive in that it might not rank the best place to buy highly because it is not in my local area.

Now what IMO would be nice is a search engine that understands these human differences, and instead of ranking the results by location when I am looking to buy some antivirus software for instance, would understand that location makes no difference and would instead rank them by price, but when I look for pizza upgrade the importance of location.

[Maximilian]

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