Like the past several years, including last year, David Mihm has published the local ranking factors for 2014.
It is basically a bunch of search experts responding to a questionnaire aimed at understanding what these experts think about local ranking factors.
David Mihm summed up his thoughts on the results:
- user behavorial signals on the site now appear to count higher than previously.
- proximity to the searcher has been significantly cranked up, even on the desktop. As David puts it: "The user is the new Centroid."
- following the Pigeon changes, domain authority plays a larger part in local rankings.
- consistency of unlinked citations in authoritative sources appear to affect even localized organic results.
Here are some of the graphs but a lot more are on the official report.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
This post was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today. FYI, I am offline today, so if Google does a Penguin update - I won't get to it until Monday.
