Last week Google rolled out a sizeable change to how it handles local search. It has been nicknamed Pigeon, and it has visibly rearranged local results in the US so far. UK rollout has not landed yet, but these things rarely stay on one side of the Atlantic for long, so it is worth understanding now rather than when it turns up here.
The short version of what people are seeing: local results now lean much more heavily on the ordinary web ranking signals. Distance and location still matter, but Google appears to be tying the local algorithm more closely to its core one, so the factors that help you rank normally are helping in the local results too. The old sense of local being a slightly separate, self contained system with its own logic has weakened.
A few concrete effects being reported:
- Directories are doing better. Sites like Yelp and various local directories are showing up more prominently in some searches, which has annoyed a fair few small business owners who were ranking directly before and now find an aggregator sitting above them.
- The local pack sizes have changed. For some queries the block of map results has shrunk or shifted, which reshuffles who gets that prime visibility.
- Some businesses have dropped, some have jumped, and the pattern is not always obvious from the outside, which is normal in the first week of any update while everyone works out what actually changed.
I would resist any temptation to make drastic changes based on a week of US chatter. The sensible response to Pigeon is the same as the sensible response to most updates, which is to do the ordinary things properly. If the local algorithm is now leaning on core ranking factors, then your normal site quality, your links, your content and your technical health all matter more for local visibility than they did. That is not a new tactic, it is the existing work counting for more.
The citation and Google My Business fundamentals I would have argued for a month ago have not gone anywhere either. If anything they are the stable ground while the ranking side gets reshuffled. Get the listing right, keep the details consistent, earn the reviews, and make the actual website good enough to rank on its own merits.
For now I am watching the US results and waiting to see when and how this reaches the UK. When it does I expect the same story: the businesses that had done the boring groundwork will wobble less than the ones relying on local being a soft option.
