Johannes Beus
You should have asked yourself the question of how Google Maps actually works, what the ranking-criteria are and how you will get by as best as possible even before Google started to display the Onbox including Google-Maps for regional references. Additionally it is only a question of time until the Usenet-search will be replaced by Google's local search.
To understand this, you need to have a fundamental knowledge of the workings of Google-Maps. Google-Maps does not only use one sources like the normal Google-search but a multitude of different data sources. These are simplified into a format that can be realized by machines and then the thereby generated index is used for the search. In a
Patent that Google submitted in September of last year, they are addressing three kinds of data:
- Reliable data that can be read by a machine – XML – or other data that are directly machine-readable from commercial databank-suppliers or telephone book-publishing houses, proprietary Google-data (it seems that, by now, Google is also compiling them in Germany) or data that are made available by large franchise enterprises.
- Less reliable and unstructured data from web directories – crawled data from industry- and city directories with known or unknown data-formats.
- Unstructured data from the web – in this category you have informations provided through the already known crawling-process of the normal websearch.
Google inputs these data and then tries to standardize the present fields as well as integrate the information into Google's already existing data structure. That way different kinds of writing and notations are recognized and simplified. This step should be the most demanding seeing that the quality of the following search is dependent on good results.
The index that is thereby created can then be used for different kinds of searches (Google Maps, organic search, SMS/telephone search). The amount, quality and quantity of the fundamental data seem to be factors for the ranking. The following points should be clear to the operator of a regionally relevant website or searchengineoptimizers that are concerned with this subject:
- The more weight Google allocated to a source, the more time and work should be invested therein. Having the correct data in the Google-Business center should be of paramount interest. After that in decreasing order are the data in telephone books, Yellow-pages and other sources.
- You should make sure that the data on your homepage are always current and possibly available in standardized form.
- It can be useful to enter your business into Yellow pages or databases that Google is obviously using (recognizable through other sites from the city or industry).
With Google Maps and the local search, Google has realized the problem of joining and standardizing data from different sources amazingly well.
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