Wil Reynolds from Seer tweeted this link from Michael Gray’s blog earlier today, which basically answers the question of whether hCards are actually beneficial to SEO with “probably not”. Now, I’m not in a position to really argue based on anything I’ve seen (and my official position is that I agree with Gray), but we did see something last month with one of our clients that made me wonder about whether hCards were beneficial to our local search visibility, and I’d been meaning to post about it.

The rundown is this: We’re currently ranking well for a fairly competitive term in the Philadelphia region. Our organic positioning is in the top 3, and our local business positioning is generally #1 out of about 5 “top” results. However, for the past week or so, we’ve noticed that our client has become the only local business result for the phrase, despite there being very clear competitors who are also engaged in SEO.

To illustrate, the local results used to look something like this:

Google Local multiple results

And now, it triumphantly looks like this, at least from when and where I’m searching (identifying information removed):

Google local single result

One of our changes at the start of this month was the implementation of hCard formatting for their address, so I’m wondering if that change has given us a leg up on the local results. It’s quite possible that there are other factors at work here, but it was enough to make me wonder. Any thoughts?

As ZDNet and other quick-to-act news outlets are reporting, Google and Google related sites (blogger, YouTube, etc) had a major outage today that lasted about an hour depending on where you are located. Some areas saw nothing, whereas some of us (like Philadelphia) were in total Google blackout. Some interesting things happened during the outage, and I just wanted to comment on a few of them:

#googlefail

I had simply assumed, like many people probably did, that when I started having Google connectivity issues, the problem was with my local connection. However, almost immediately, the #googlefail tag started trending on Twitter. One of the most interesting points about the Twitter trend is that the news outlets who picked up the story during the outage also used the Twitter trend as their source of information (The Huffington Post even had a direct feed of the #googlefail trend). Social media had a big win today, and I suspect that the argument for microblogging as a valuable tool (as opposed to just a time waster) gained some credibility among the (misinformed) nay-sayers today.

Our Reliance on Google

Productivity took a huge hit for the time when Google was down, since so many sites directly and indirectly utilize Google services. Obviously, YouTube, blogger, and other Google properties were nowhere to be found on the web, but sites that use Google analytics or link to Google Code also suffered. Many sites were continually loading as they waited for google-analytics.com, to no avail. Additionally, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google tasks were all down, resulting in complete work stoppage for some (deemed #googleholiday on Twitter)

What it will mean

Honestly, I don’t think we’ll see any major fallout from today’s outage. People won’t be running away from Google Analytics or returning to pen and paper for their calendar. Nothing is perfect, even the Google network, and early reports (see ZDNet link above) seem to be suggesting that the problem was with AT&T’s network. However, today will probably be cited as a risk factor for the emerging interest in cloud computing, and it will be interesting to see how the web community’s perception of Google is altered, if at all.