Google Place Pages is an interesting addition to Google’s Local results that I wrote about here when it came out. We’ve been crawling all over them analyzing them and trying to figure out the best ways to utilize them for the benefit of our clients.  One of the most interesting parts of the Google Place Page is the “Web Pages” Section pictured below. Our burning question was: How does Google decide which websites appear here??

Citation, Citation, Citation

The most obvious answer is that Google chooses pages that cite the business in question in some way.  For instance, the following page which is the second result on the place page above, includes the Brand Name, a link to the corporate website, the address of the specific Starbucks in question, and a phone number for the specific Starbucks in question:

This is an almost perfect example of the kinds of pages Google gathers for it’s place pages.  The only way it could be better is if the Starbucks in question had its own website instead of the corporate website to link to.  So, our next question is which types of citations matter the most, since inevitably – as with the following example of Urban Spoon – not every page is going to include all the citations together.

Finding Important Citations

In order to find out which types of citations were most important, we gathered together a list of 33 different web pages from various Google Place Pages to find out which types of citations were included the most.  The following graph distills our findings:

As you can see, the Address and Brand name were almost always included. The phone number inclusion seemed to be relatively important.  The link and email address were less important. Great. So what combinations of citations worked the best, and which were more or less important from a ranking perspective. Good Question. Unfortunately, to get that kind of information accurately, thousands of place pages would have to be analyzed.  But just for fun, and because I figured out how to make pretty colored borders in Excel today, I’ll show you our findings for the 33 pages that we analyzed.

The data suggests that the variety of citation matters quite a bit in deciding the ranking of referring web pages  in the Google Place Pages.  I’m sure there are about a million other factors that Google takes into consideration algorithmically, but it’s good to know that if we went out there and helped our clients create excellent profiles on some of the seed sites Google seems to typically use to populate the Place Pages, we can help them control a bit of this very powerful user experience. 

Further Place Page Theories

On a purely anecdotal note, and with no actual information to back me up, it also seemed that the type of page seemed to matter as well.  Pages with fewer links on them and ones that appeared to be more than just directory pages seemed to show up higher in this section. Just a thought.

If anyone else has any thoughts, feel free to share them!

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