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Can't make sense out of the way Google Maps position their results.

Here is my places page, that I'm trying to optimize for the "sprinkler hollywood florida" keywords and appears at the end of 3rd page, and here is the 4st place for those keywords.

Their listing in Google places has less information than ours, they have a bad review and we have a good one, their web site is a 1 page web site, our is about 6, our site has more backlinks than theirs. I just can't find anything they could be doing that we are not.

Maybe just that they have been longer in Google Places. Could this be what makes the difference?

Edit: I just found one other difference that might be what is making the difference. Their domain name includes the word "sprinklers". Could it be this?

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There's a lot more to SEO than a Google Places listing or number of pages in a website. There are at least 200 ranking factors and they vary in importance.

The site that is outranking you probably has better quality links then you do. Quantity of backlinks is irrelevant. Quality is what matters. Not to mention you don't know how many backlinks they really have since Google doesn't report all of them on purpose.

Their URL structure may be more search engine friendly. This includes having keywords in the domain. Having "sprinklers" in their domain name definitely is helping them out.

If you want to make sure your pages are optimized you should start with this question and then continue to do more research on SEO. Especially in this site since there are a lot of SEO questions with good answers.

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  • They show 0 backlinks on Yahoo Site Explorer. Did you look at the page? It's barely a web page. But yes, I do think the domain name is helping a lot and I'll take a look at your link too. – Juan Jul 9 '11 at 17:22
  • Yahoo doesn't know about as many web pages as Google so it usually under reports links compared to Google. But it's quite possible the big difference between the two web sites is the keyword in the domain name since the term you are optimizing for isn't competitive. Thus one big factor could be what makes all the difference. – John Conde♦ Jul 9 '11 at 17:25

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