Website associated with GMB no longer in position 1 for brand search

[Vivek]

Hi all,

I manage a number of hotel listings in Asia-Pacific and noticed a sudden drop in traffic to the sites. Further investigation found that this was due to the websites dropping from position 1 to position 2 for brand searches.
I work for Starwood hotels and most hotels have 2 websites, a small section on starwoodhotels.com/propertyname and another propertyname.com. As you'd expect starwoodhotels.com has a higher authority so naturally outranks the propertyname.com for 'property name' searches in most situations.
We found by adding propertyname.com to our GMB profiles we could outrank starwoodhotels.com.

The recent Google updates however have removed the map marker under the SERP listing and most recently added a small "Website" button to the knowledge graph, instead of granting position 1 ranking to the URL associated with the GMB listing. (Please see the screenshots below)

Old SERP:


New SERP:


Let me know if you need any further clarification.

Just wanted to know if anyone anywhere else in the world has seen the same Google 'update' or the similar knowledge graph changes?

Thanks and I hope everyone is enjoying the festive season!

Vivek

 

[Eric Rohrback]

I'm seeing a lot of the listings previously in a one pack style for branded searches being pulled into a knowledge graph style display (entity graph), and that looks like what's happening with you. It looks like both of those top results are Sheraton hotels with very similar title tags, so how different is the copy on the page? Maybe the sites are so similar it's causing them to flip flop positions.

I have seen quite a few pins being removed within the organic search results in favor of only the entity result though.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Vivek, more info in this post by Mike B if you haven't checked it out yet - Google Nukes the Local Pin for One Boxes? | Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Colan, just got back in the office and was coming to post that too.

 

[Vivek]

Thanks everyone for your input, and thanks Colan for pointing me to Mike's article!

Much appreciated