Google Publishes Guidelines for Local Sites & Location Landing Pages

[Linda Buquet]

Google Developers has a great resource with guidelines and tips for making location pages that are discoverable and crawlable.

They stress unique pages/URLs for each location and using schema. But then also say they can parse the info if all locations are properly marked up on a page.

However keep in mind this is not talking about Places so it's not taking into account the potential merge aspect or ranking impact if she gets confused and can't match up the right Place page with the right location.

Here is the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog post:
Surfacing your business's contact and local info in Google

Today, we are launching support for schema.org markup to help you specify your preferred phone numbers using structured data markup embedded on your website. Four types of phone numbers are currently supported:

Customer service
Technical support
Billing support
Bill payment

Plus there is a lot more at that link above! Hat tip to David Deering's post below.

I 1st discovered this via Mark Goho's post. I guess I should dig into developer help docs more often.

Location pages for local businesses and organizations - Google Developers

Guidelines for building websites for local businesses

Like any content webmasters want to surface in Google search results, good location pages are easy to crawl by Googlebot and their content is easily indexed. Specifically:

Have each location's or branch's information accessible on separate webpages
Allow Googlebot to discover and crawl the location pages
The location information should be presented in an easy-to-understand format
Use schema.org structured data markup

Each location's or branch's information should be readily available on a webpage. This means that each location needs to be accessible on a unique URL. Knowing the correct page for each location allows Google's algorithms to surface the page for the relevant queries.

Head over to read the rest. There is quite a lot of information.

Then on this page there is schema.org examples for location pages.

So nice to see the Official Google Webmaster Blog focus on local!

​

 

[David Deering]

Google Announces Recommendations for Location Pages

Today on their Webmaster Central blog, Google announced their recommendations to help you build more user and search-friendly business location pages. They provide some suggestions on how you can specify preferred phone numbers such as customer service and tech support and how to specify the hours of operation as well. They also provided links to view some examples of how to do so.

Google is beginning to display more and more specific business info in the SERPs, and by following these suggestions, which involve using structured data markup, it will help you help your clients become more visible in the SERPs and even see more targeted traffic.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Surfacing your business's contact and local info in Google

---------- Post Merged at 10:18 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 10:15 AM ----------

Well shoot, Linda, it looks like we were typing at the same time and you were just faster than me. lol

Here's Linda's post regarding the same announcement: http://localsearchforum.catalystema...-guidelines-local-sites-location-landing.html

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thank so much David, I merged your post into mine.

Don't worry I'd much rather have you guys post than not and assume I might, because I do sometimes miss stuff. So I figure a double post is better than none at all.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Oh and actually I had not seen the blog post. That has some even better info and now I learned that's where Mark found the page I linked to.

So David I'm adding your link to my original post too.

 

[David Deering]

Cool, thanks Linda. At least we know we're on the same page.