24 Mar, 2010
Google Local Business Listing Anomaly
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There have long been complaints about the strange local results often returned in the UK Google SERPs. Searches such as “tennis court for hire” bring back large packs of Australian websites instead of UK websites as you would expect. Although these anomalies have become common place on google.co.uk, it is not often you see Google Local business listings that are incorrect.
Here, however, is a strange one…
A search on Google UK for “language school manchester” brings up the following Google Local business listings:
As you can see from the highlighted result, KDP (UK) Ltd is displaying. This seems fine at first glance, but a quick trip to their website (which is awful, by the way) shows that they are:
importers, exporters, and stockist of semi-finished copper & copper alloys
At first I presumed it had just been categorised incorrectly by the business owner, but having checked out the listing, it hasn’t actually been verified.
Delving deeper into the listing, the citations provide a bit of a clue into why this seemingly incorrect categorisation by Google has happened.
As seen in the above screen shot, www.languagecentre.co.uk is showing up as one of the citations. Having visited the website, there are no mentions of KDP; no similar phone number, address or anything that may be prone to being used in citations. So why is it showing?
A quick run through the Majestic SEO bad neighbourhood checker shows the following:
And there you have it. KDP International is on the same server as languagecenre.co.uk, which is what seems to be causing Google to believe that KDP is in fact a language school.
It’s a bit of a strange one, but this means that Google must take into account the neighbourhood of a website when determining categorisation for local listings.
Has anybody else seen any similarly strange results recently? Do you have a different idea of why this result may have been categorised incorrectly? Comments welcome as always.
PS – While we’re on the subject of Google Local, you should checkout the excellent presentation slides by Tom Critchlow from Think Visibility.
3 | Kieron Hughes
May 5th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Yeah the results in directories/other websites obviously dictate the way Google automatically categorises certain listings, but the reason I missed it was because there were only a couple of citations on the listing page – none of which relating to language schools (no phone number matches, etc).
Obviously I would have found them by Googling the phone number, but I guess I didn’t think of doing that at the time!
Google has now picked up the citations on the listing so it all makes sense again!
Thanks Kay.