Google’s Eric Stein was part of a panel discussion today at SMX East entitled “What’s New With Local Search Marketing,” moderated by Greg Sterling who posted this Q & A with Stein earlier today: Google Answers Your Local Questions. Sterling’s Q&A with Stein focused on preventing spam and how business owners can keep their listings current.

Stein pointed out that Google values a verified business owner’s listing as the most authoritative. However, Google will list third party data, like yellow page listings, along with the business owner’s listing.

He also discussed why Google doesn’t bold keywords in business names in the local search results. This issue caused some confusion in the past because a Google-promoted best practice is to include keywords in the title of a webpage.

“On Google Maps, our mission is to show users the proper names and addresses of physical businesses,” stated Stein. “The Business Title is not the title of a website – it is the title of the actual business. Adding keywords to this field moves away from giving users the proper representation of the businesses they see on the map.”

Google is also taking steps to prevent spammers from infiltrating the local search results. One of these steps is providing quality guidelines and removing entries that do not meet the specified criteria. Google seems committed to providing quality listings for local businesses.

Read the full Q&A on Search Engine Land’s website: http://searchengineland.com/google-answers-your-local-questions-14956.php

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 3:54 pm by Brittany Paxman and is filed under Google, Industry Events, Natural Search (SEO), Online Marketing, SMX East 2008, Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.