There has been a lot of speculation about having a GMB linking back to a page and that it is helping it rank. James thought that it might be time to test this and see the real deal on GMB links.
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James is one of the good testers that we have. I mean, he's all right. It's a great test. And as you guys know, we're trying to delve into different things. GMB and YouTube are two good things that we want to work out because business owners are going to be using these things.
James wanted to know of just having that backlink on your GMB is actually going to give you a boost in rankings. And really, at the end of the day, you kind of expect that this would happen or at least build the association between your website in that GMB to help establish an entity. And there go establishing the entity inside of the Google algorithm will turn into trust.
And if I'm trusted, then I should rank higher right? And long story short, we scroll through his setup is you know, James, as you guys have seen enough of James's setup, it's always the same. But he dropped the link in here, just as you would expect, and then waited for the rankings to go through.
As a follow there have been several articles out recently where people are changing this link and putting like Yelp in their Better Business Bureau, etc. And supposedly ranking higher I can tell you that I've messed with that on multiple maps, legit and ppl maps that never get higher rankings.
So you probably don't want to do that. But in this case, yeah, James set this up. August 14 is what he initially did, you see it as standard is right in the middle, and then we'll scroll through as he progresses. Here's the 15th of August, the page drop, 17th drops more, and then he waited for all the way up to the 26th and it was pretty much down there at the bottom. So we can take from this that you're having just your link in that GMB section on your website in and of itself as absolutely well like the power for you.
A good follow-up test I like to see James do is actually send links to that GMB, maybe even the CID. But prior to GMB directly for the purpose of this test just to see if it'll pass through that map and send power to the website that would be probably the next step in the evolution of these tests, which would be pretty good.
But I think in and of itself knowing that as a business owner, you're not going to get any ranking benefit by picking one URL over the other one, it's more of a relevant thing.
It's more establish the entity for that location to help your Google better understand at least in the broke maps algorithm where your map should be ranked and hopefully if you can capture the three packs, there's that.