Holy sh*t...google...no

Google recently expanded the "google places" and landmarks when you use the search engines. So if you are going for seo with a business. You need a top google places spot now.

F*CK.

Could you give a better explanation please.

It's displaying two different ways. One way is almost like it always has been with a short section below the top 2-3 natural search spots but they moved the map to the right sidebar where it pushes the ppc listing down a bit.

The other way the map is on the right sidebar, the difference is the map results are just a big as the organic results. This pushes all the organic results below the map results, so if you are #1 organic you now show up as # 6,7,8. Google has got to change this

I noticed this yesterday too and came to the conclusion that this would cause a lot of grief for people focused on the Local SEO market as it appeared to me that there was very little real-estate left on page 1 for their SEO'd rankings to land.

I even started a post on this but decided not to post it as SEO is not my specialty and I thought maybe I was misunderstanding what was going on here.

Anyway, I'm interested to see how this plays out.

yeh it's kind of crazy.. but i like it as i am now at the top of the local search
where before i was under the 10 box map