or our SEO team, this breaking news about a particular Google update had us almost spitting out our coffee in amazement; a major change in Google search has been executed with little spectacle. If you haven’t heard the news travelling along the search grapevine yet, Google Venice is a major change and not just for SEOs.
What is Google Venice?
With the purpose of producing locally targeted organic results, Google Venice ranks sites with more geographically relevant pages higher than those just containing the generic keywords originally searched for. Therefore, organic results are shown according to local relevance rather than general results.
As you can see from our example of “personal trainer” (we’re limbering up for the Chester Marathon, so we need all the help we can get!), the search results are showing locally targeted results relevant to us in Chester.
Why haven’t I heard of it?
Google Venice was detailed in the 40 algorithm changes released by the search colossus with zero fanfare, but why was this buried by Google? Questions are remaining unanswered. The only evidence released was these couple of lines in the February changes:
“Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename "Venice"] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.”
(http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html)
Google Venice has maximum significance to digital marketers, as every site offering a geographical service must now think long and hard about the geographical aspect of their SEO strategy.
What are your thoughts on Google Venice? What is its impact for you?
