Google introducing Place Search

On the 27th of October 2010 Google announced the launch of a new vertical search feature: Places Search. This feature is available like many of the other vertical search features via the left hand navigation.

At the same time of launching this feature the layout of the local listings in the normal search result pages also changed. This is what they used to look like:

With the new layout, the map is moved to the right hand side, above the Adwords ads, and the listings take up a little more space in the "organic" result listing. Like this:

So what kind of effect will this have on SEO? Probably not that much since the biggest change is that the map is positioned on top of the Adwords ads on the right hand side. So maybe the ads on the right hand side will receive less clicks. But there are also some signs of more changes than this going on. These changes are however not shown all the time yet. See this example:

Here we can see that the "places" listings are positioned with, and laid out much more like, the organic listings. And they also take up much more space. If this is something that will stick, a good listing in Google Places will become much more important for local businesses. It has always been a very good idea to optimize for better listing in Google Places, but with this it will become more or less a show stopper if you don't.

There are also some tests being conducted where you are able to buy these local listings through something called Google Boost. Given the last of my examples above and given that you can buy your listing in Google Places this becomes pretty close to buying organic listings.

If you ask me, Google is walking on thin ice with this one. A lot of search queries, especially a lot of commercial search queries, are local in nature. And if we, in the future, will be able to simply pay Google for a better local listing, the credibility and trust of the Google results will, at least in my eyes, take a big hit.

I guess only the future will tell exactly how this will evolve and how the search community and the users will respond to it.

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