What’s with Google?
I wandered into the ‘website design’ area of Google to be met with a map of other designers and some short links. I knew that Google was going for a ‘local Google’ but naively thought that this was an ‘opt in’.
Also, what has happened to google.co.za? Disappeared with the advent of the map pins? I thought that it was very handy. I can call up the co.nz and co.uk versions of Google so why can I not call up the local version instead of a redirect to the com?
Everybody works hard to get to the top of Google and now I see what appears to be a list of paid links at the top of the SERP. If they’re Adwords links on the right, fair enough but not directly on top of those sites who have worked hard (or their webmasters have worked hard) to get to the top.
I can only hope that visitors to Google will find that although there are operations that are local, they are not necessarily going to be what they want. And, that there are plenty of other ‘local’ operations that are not part of what seems to be an exclusive list and which have got to the top of the list by virtue of the search optimization of their sites. Now, I don’t know whether the list is dynamically generated or paid for but Google’s job is to produce search results relevant to the search terms.
If there was a local component, then that was catered for in the search results but now, competitors are at the top of the list that quite possibly have thrown a website together.