Is google places Biased ??

Just looked at my real estate niche and the top 6 are all the major UK corporations - now how does a smaller indepdent get there?

Think google may be biased. After hours work I am on P1 of google for certain terms but they come first due to google places.

Anything u can suggest ??

english please
what are you asking here?

scottishhousemove said:

Just looked at my real estate niche and the top 6 are all the major UK corporations - now how does a smaller indepdent get there?

Think google may be biased. After hours work I am on P1 of google for certain terms but they come first due to google places.

Anything u can suggest ??

Click to expand...

I was doing some analysis on the places competition for a client about 5 min ago.. All I found was PR quality of Incoming links + the domain age and content volume of the link givers + domain age of competition site.

Those would out rank in places...

I just searched for "estate agent my town" (my town = town within London) and got all the local agents in the places pack. Not a sign of Prime Location or Right Move etc.
What keywords are you looking at?

Not biased mate it depends on the search term you use. The key here is that places is local, it aims to return local results.
It does this in two ways, it either picks up the location of the searcher by interrogating his/her IP address in which it can extrapolate rough location or by interrogation of the query used.
For example.

If a search is made for 'Hotel' then G will try and figure out where you are, if it can it will return a SERP based on the town you are present in. If not then it may not return a places pack at all. If it does return a places pack they will all be local and it may use other indicators to assist it ie are you logged into to a google account.

Around them in the generic listing will be the other main players, in this niche Late Rooms, Expedia ect.

If the query is 'Hotel London' then it will return a places pack of Hotels in London plus the usual big players (see above) in the Generic but these will be the London subpages.
An example would be laterooms/london.

Also, think about this. If its a "large" corporation that has hit the Top place in GPlaces, then chances are it is spending some $$$$ to get there/stay there. I would hazard a guess and say that they have more quality reviews, PR links etc etc...

Also, if they are closer to where you are searching from, then that might trigger a higher ranking as well