Is anyone out there seen a massive dip in Google Places traffic since the massive site links went live?
I know I have however; I would love to hear from anyone else that has experienced this problem. I don’t think it’s a missive problem as I am pretty confident it’s just a shift in traffic distribution now site links have pushed Google Places results further down the SERPs.
The traffic will once again be distributed to natural search as most users will now click on the original link or a new site link instead of the Google Places link.
A better explaination
We created vanity URLs and then 301 redirected them to UTM URLs. Once we created and 301nd the vanity URLs to UTM URLS we changed the original links in the Google Places account to the new vanity URLs. The UTM URLs allow us to track data coming from the pack results and Google Places pages. Merged search engine results sets do not track as Google Places, these track as natural search results.
The massive site links were rolled out by Google around the 15th – 16th of August. Just take a look at the dip in traffic.
As you can see visitor numbers declined from around 450 per day to around 200 per day, eventually visitor numbers dropped to around 30 to 40 per day.
I would like to know if anyone else who tracks Google Places data has seen the same problems.
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Keen on all things digital marketing. My main expertise lie in local search engine optimisation. Any questions or views on the subject please get in touch. We also accept guest blog posts on the subject however, they have to pass our strict quality guide lines.