Backlinks are clearly a ranking factor for websites. An important aspect of current SEO theory is establishing “trust” and “authority.” If a backlink can boost the ranking of a website, a domain in the same niche, forwarded to a GMB could signal to Google that all trust signals related to the domain should now be attached to the GMB. Will this also work same as with linking to websites? We test that out.
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This is from Marc Moeller, also a new tester. This is fun because now we are looking at maps. We are trying to manipulate map ranking and one thing that I want to mention is there is a slight typo in here, he has two listings, two different companies. You can see here that they are exactly the same. Listing one is Sparsh Technologies, listing two is Sydney IT Software Developers. They are two different companies.
What we do here is we’ve got these map listing for these two companies and we are going to redirect high authority domains at them and see if this will boost them in the maps. The idea is, can we send niche relevant, super high authority, and get their map rankings to go up. The whole GMB stuff, the entity stuff that we were talking about, we want to see them move up in the map pack.
He used a pretty cool thing, Local Falcon, I have not played with it but what it does, if you look at this small map area here, you give your area for your local search and it actually does the local search on each of these pins as though it is somebody on these locations doing that search. Cause you know, local rankings shift based on location, proximity to the search is the number one factor. So, this Local Falcon actually does that in this foray zone, you draw the region that you are in and it gives you the local search and I thought that was really cool.
This first one, the software development Sydney, which is where the Sparse Technology is, it is on this 9-14 range and the other one, Sydney IT company which is Sydney IT Software Company is at the 9-11 range and then the link is redirected in. Super niched so it is right in this IT and super high authority, it has great domains coming in, it is the kind of link that you would want and there was no effect on the map movement, whatsoever. This debunks a lot of what people talk about in sending high authority domains to your GMBs or redirecting them in. It may not be giving the push that they need and this kind of goes back to what we were looking at before when I ran around Phoenix doing local searches to identify what might be some ranking factors and links just weren’t there for ranking in the maps. I think you can get a lot of other benefit from link building but specifically running the maps doesn’t do it. The first one actually dropped a little bit which is pretty funny, couple of spots here and there and the second one is in the same spot.
Forwarding these things in, getting a completely on point link, it really doesn’t look like it is going to help your maps that much. If actually, not at all.
Dori: Clint says you can actually kill a map with links direct to it.
That makes a lot of sense to me. The link that Marc got here in this situation is it couldn’t be more on point, it couldn’t be more than the link that you really want and at a minimum it should have at least a little something. If these things are going to behave as they were with regular organic results and links but not at all.