[Doug Holloway]

Hi Steve

It is definitely still worth having the name in the url.

cheers

Doug

[Steve Chapman]

Ok maybe I'll get motivated & put something together 

Steve

[Doug Holloway]

Hi steve

It will definitely be worth doing

Cheers

Doug

[garry22]

Steve,

It might be a good idea to do absolutely nothing.

There have been two huge Google updates in the last few days. One allegedly, was aimed at "over optimisation"

As usual it looks like there has been a lot of "collateral damage" where innocent sites have been hammered as much as guilty ones. If they update again to reduce this then the results will be all over the shop for a while.

Garry

[alan_lewis]

Garry

Can you explain why for example, if 1 person lives in Bristol and another person lives in Exeter and they both type into google "carpet cleaners Birmingham" why do they see different page results? because surely were they live should have no effect on the search results for Birmingham?

Alan

[Garyj]

Steve,

It might be a good idea to do absolutely nothing.

There have been two huge Google updates in the last few days. One allegedly, was aimed at "over optimisation"

As usual it looks like there has been a lot of "collateral damage" where innocent sites have been hammered as much as guilty ones. If they update again to reduce this then the results will be all over the shop for a while.

Garry

I don't think Steve will come close to over optimising, Google is after the sites that rack up 100's and 1000's of backlinks in a few hours.

Get on and do them Steve.

[Warren Aldridge]

I find that being at the top of certain towns/cities doesn't pay dividends as much as being at the top of places.
Getting a top places link is goal number 1, but like Gary said... how you do that, only God knows

What I do find though is your 'whois' plays a large role... in other words the address your domain is registered to.

[Warren Aldridge]

Another way to give your places account more clout is to register your business domain and address onto as many online directories as possible.

Places uses part of this info for its own rankings

i.e Yell, Thompsons etc etc

[Steve Chapman]

So to sum up I could nothing or everything 

One things for sure it shows nobody has got a real handle on what google is doing or fully understands the changes taking place .

It can't hurt to put a few more sites together I suppose 

Steve

[garry22]

Garry

Can you explain why for example, if 1 person lives in Bristol and another person lives in Exeter and they both type into google "carpet cleaners Birmingham" why do they see different page results? because surely were they live should have no effect on the search results for Birmingham?

Alan

The honest answer is "no,  I cannot"    That is what happened when Gary and I looked at the Weymouth results.

There are different data centres around the world and sometimes you can get a difference in results depending on where they pull the data from at various times. I'm surprised that places as close as Exeter and Bristol yield different ones, especially when using a geographical modifier such as "Birmingham".

There is also Geotargeting, where if someone types in a generic keyword like say, "carpet cleaning" (without the town name), they should get served up local results according to their IP address.

As I said above, there have been two big Google updates recently and many people (myself included) have taken hits. To rub salt into the wounds, a competitor who is building a network of spammy backlinks and satellite mini site network with lousy content has actually gone up! So much for rewarding original content.... c'est la vie.