#my accuracy isn’t quite where i want it yet BUT it’s improving. and i’m learning to handle the pace

[mars-ipan]

finally (read: less than a day in) getting used to hard mode…

[abraxos-the-phantom]

Scum Disciple: Alpha Stage

Alpha, described by google as "...an exploratory phase. Beta means the features have been locked down and are under development (no other features will be added). More commonly: Alpha: Usually the first normally interact-able thing out (private or public use is irrelevant)."

And here are some of the highlights that I liked from the first few versions lol.

Fun Times in Gusu

Lan Xichen walked to quite a strange sight.

While normally he would have greeted the younger Nie with a smile, the image of the famous Wei Wuxian pouting as YunmengJiang’s young master and QingheNie’s second master grinned was a little too ridiculous for him to process without chuckling.

“We both know you aren’t actually going to tell Ming-shixiong,” Nie Huaisang chuckled at the shifted to pat the other.

“Yeah,” Wei Wuxian sighed. “I’m worried though.”

Jiang Wanyin had raised his eyebrow, making quite the image as he looked over his crossed arms, “You’re worried about your brother? QingheNie Sect’s Monster Head disciple? The Youngest Rogue Cultivator in the Generations? The Peerless Prodigy? I think you’re a little delusioned Wei Wuxian.”

Wei Wuxian’s nose crumbled at that, “They really call Gēge that? Such lame names.”

“I think brother called him the Crane Dragon once,” Nie Huaisang added. “When you and Ming-shixiong went on a Night Hunt.”

Wei Wuxian shook his head, “Forget it, that’s not what I’m worried about- it’s just. Gēge has never let me on my own like this before. He gets antsy.”

Nie Huaisang pursed his lips, “I can understand but- A-Xian, you’re one of his best students.”

“He just- he gets this look sometimes,” Wei Wuxian sighed. “He doesn’t talk about it but sometimes he looks at me and I’m pretty sure he’s seeing something else. I never asked because he always looks sad after.”

“Didn’t you grow up together?” Nie Huaisang frowned. “I don’t think I��ve ever seen Ming-shixiong with anyone else besides the three of us but the other disciples.”

“He’s never talked to anyone except father, mother, myself, sister, and some of the disciples at our sect,” Jiang Wanyin said in agreement. “You guys didn’t meet anyone when your Brother was still Rogue?”

Wei Wuxian shook his head in Jiang Wanyin’s direction, expression slightly pinched still, “I wouldn't remember, and I know we’re close- but there’s some stuff I know he hasn’t told me. You guys realize that my brother is nineteen?”

Jiang Wanyin blinked, as well as several other disciples who were not so covertly listening into the conversation about the mysterious prodigal Cultivator of the QingheNie Sect. “He seems much older, I didn’t think anyone knew his actual age.”

Because that was the curiosity wasn’t it, for all that he was well-known, there was never truly anyone who knew Wei Ming, because he would never actually say anything about his past save for vague hints. One could ask Wei Wuxian of course, but the latter had the same result because of the mere fact that Wei Wuxian didn’t know much about his older brother either beyond his personality, likes and dislikes. Any years before Wei Ming had lived with his brother was knowledge he couldn’t even forget because he never knew in the first place. Nie Mingjue never asked, and neither did Nie Huaisang. It took Wei Ying meeting other children to realize that nine-year-olds never talked the way Wei Ming did. They didn’t know facts about monsters, and they certainly never talked about demons. Yet Wei Ming had extensive knowledge since who knows how long, and no one ever questioned it.

Whether that was because Wei Ming knew how to subvert the conversation or because they simply never asked, that was a question no one could really answer. Not even Wei Wuxian, for all that he loved his Gēge, knew where to start.

Sensing the sudden dip in Wei Wuxian’s mood, Nie Huaisang brightened as much as he could, “Well it doesn’t even matter does it? He’s your brother, he’s my teacher- and he scares my brother to boot.”

Wei Wuxian laughed, if a little weakly, “He told me he actually enjoys it a little.”

Jiang Wanyin winced, “Isn’t your brother known to your Sect as the Punisher?”

With an enthusiastic nod from both Nie Sect members, they proceeded to scare everyone else by saying, “300 copies of Consequence, 200 paces across the hills and back in three days and patrolls in three of the Qinghe protected lands by the end of two weeks!”

They silently cackled as the other Sect disciples paled at the prospect.

<page break heyho>

After gently teasing Wangji of his interaction with Wei Wuxian, Lan Xichen bid his brother a good night as he suddenly remembered what he had sought the older Wei out for. The technique he used was quite unique and not among any technique he had some knowledge of, though granted it could purely be because he himself was not well learned in any but the Lan Sect style. Regardless, he was hoping to have a discussion about it and to possibly inquire if the older Wei would use his expertise to critique his own swordsmanship.

He was just about to do just that before he heard an audible thunk and grunt of pain from within the room Wei Ming had been assigned for his stay here.

Lan Xichen abruptly opened the door out of instinct, blinking in surprise to find Wei Ming wielding a brush in his hand and a paper in the other, dark eyes roving the entire wooden table with apprehension.

“Mn?” Wei Ming looked up with a raised eyebrow. “Oh, Zewu-jun. I was under the impression you had retired for the night.”

“I had initially been hoping to discuss swordsmanship with you before,” Lan Xichen looked at the papers, elegant calligraphy lining each and every one save for the large stack of paper at the corner of the table. “I admit, however, that this seems to take my interest far more at the moment.”

“Ah, well.” Wei Ming gestured to the papers. “These are lesson plans, notes if you will- but plans all the same.”

“...Lesson plans?”

Wei Ming nodded seriously, “It’s important for a teacher to understand what they are teaching every day, so as not to leave anything important out.”

“Ah…apologies, considering the subject you are teaching I thought-”

“To be fair, the material I’m teaching does require less theory than practical. Had I been teaching something akin to a bestiary subject or perhaps even medicinal practices, I wouldn’t be as extensive as this,” Wei Ming once again gestured to the large stacks. “This is not the case however, as I am teaching fighting techniques. I also have to come up with tests and exams, sort the students into pairs for sparing purposes, note everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, formulate proper lectures concerning the techniques I am teaching- that sort of thing. Besides the fact that I’m considering adding other techniques so that my students are well informed.”

Though granted the stuff he was doing was easier than when he had been Qing Jing Peak’s head disciple, the paperwork for that Sect was monstrous because of the additional lessons for music and the tactitionary course. Both were a requirement as a disciple of Qing Jing, as they were the main jack of trades within Cang Qiong as their roles were both in support and primary fighters when it came to battles. This was especially true during the pseudo war between Lou Binghe’s forces and during the battle with Tianlang-jun. Shizun would normally do most of the work but with the absence of Lou Binghe, a lot of it arrived to Ming Fan and he didn’t have the heart to inquire about it.

After Binghe’s return Ming Fan just never thought to question it anymore, Shizun was happy and he got used to the workload. It wasn’t as if he never had help either, he took charge of the male disciples while Ning Yingying took charge of the females. After Lou Binghe soon took up some work every now and then; it’s just the way things were after...After.

Wei Ming blinked after returning from his thoughts, “Hundreds of apologies, may Zewu-jun repeat himself?”

Lan Xichen smiled, “Of course, I only wished to ask if you would be open to giving me advice on my swordsmanship? Nie Mingjue mentioned before that your advice had helped him improve his saber technique and I would very much like to also improve myself now that the opportunity is open to me.”

“Or perhaps Xichen-ge would not like to be left behind by his dîdi?” Wei Ming said with an amused smile.

At this Lan Xichen’s ears colored slightly even as he smiled neutrally, “That is also a motivation, but I believe no brother would want their younger brother to leave them behind.”

“Very well, when Zewu-jun is free; we shall spar.” Wei Ming’s lips quirked. “I would also like to know if my observations are correct.”

“Let us have this spar soon Teacher Wei, thank you for your time.” Lan Xichen stood and dipped his head slightly before exiting with a final ‘good night’.

<page break hey-ho>

“Gege what are you doing?”

Wei Ming was currently in the Lan Sect library, pouring over old books that amused him and greatly reminded him of some of the brighter moments in his past life. Namely: The Resentment of Chunshan. The book itself was poor in terms of accuracy, but amusing nonetheless. He and the other disciples found themselves horrified and amused by the story described within. Even more so when the Song of BingQiu became popular among the locals.

He was also starring an old map of the land, clearly looked into by someone considering the small hand-written notes in black ink. The penmanship was oddly familiar but Wei Ming couldn’t exactly remember where.

There was also an area circled, the name Cang Qiong Sect written in careful script.

“What do you think?” He asked absentmindedly, fingers brushing over the circled area. It was far from the other Sects, inaccessible due to the mountain ranges that circled it. If one tried, they’d have to do so by climb rather than sword. The air would be thinner; challenging even for a Cultivator.

He vaguely wondered if the land had changed so much as to the sudden growth of mountains around the Cang Qiong Sect area.

“Looks like someone was trying to look for the mythical Cang Qiong Sect,” Wei Ying peered over his brother’s shoulder. Tilting his head at the map. “Weird.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Eh,” Wei Ying shrugged as he sat next to him. “Cause it’s just a legend, no one actually knows if the Cang Qiong Sect is still around. If it ever was around. I mean- demons, the War- it’s described in pretty poetry and details, but other than that- most people write it off as a fantasy since no one’s ever seen it.”

Wei Ming considered the next question carefully, “What do you believe?”

“I think there’s some truth to it,” To himself, Wei Ying vaguely wondered why the sudden inquiry. His brother had no interest in the stories that were normally told to children, he had been busy at the time and Wei Ying only knew of it because the Nie Brothers held a rather large collection of the stories of the illustrious Cang Qiong Sect and one of their most famous Lords: Shen Qingqiu. Nie Huaisang had admitted that most of these were his brother’s, and he himself was promptly amused. Now he was starting to wonder. The stories of the Cang Qiong Sect were often used for the children of Cultivators as lessons, Lan Sect used it too if what was in the library was any indication- it was an impressive collection.

Though it did have nothing on Sect Leader Nie’s secret collection of nearly all the tales of the General from Qing Jing Peak: Huázháo-jun.

“Hm, perhaps,” Wei Ming noted non-committedly, shaking his head. “Let’s talk about what to do for tomorrow.”

“Mn! You should teach-“

[Fun fact about this one up here! In this version of the story, MF brings WWX's body up through the mountains to Cang Qiong Sect in the hopes that he could get help in reviving his brother, thereby re-meeting with his fellow disciples of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect]

[loveafterthefact]

Love After the Fact Chapter 75: Two Different Kinds of Tension

One of our lead couples has lunch with their in-laws and the other couples goes on a date.

Much, much later than I said it would be, here’s chapter 75!!!

First  Previous  Next

Adam is preparing to return home, watched by a very forlorn Galra. As eager as he is to go home, to get every detail of Altea back into working order, he finds a certain reluctance tugging at the back of his shirt. A part of him wants to stay.

“Do you really have to go?” Shiro asks, not for the first or last time, even though he already knows the answer. He wants Adam to stay too, or maybe he wants to follow. Neither is possible.

“Yes, I really have to go.” Adam pulls the last of his clothes from the captain’s closet, realizing just how many of his things -all of them- made it into Shiro’s quarters. “I’m leaving tomorrow with their Majesties and Pidge, as planned and expected.”

“I know. I know. I’m just really gonna miss you. You can’t blame me for that.”

“I suppose not.” Adam murmurs, laying out a set of nightclothes and a change of clothes for tomorrow on the stool up against the wall. “Though I still don’t really know what you see in me.”

“No, you don’t, do you?” Shiro hangs his shears on the wall, sweeping the trimmings off the floor below his trellises. The pieces he wants to keep are laid out on a worktable, ready to be tied and hung. All normal, innocent, except for the sly smirk on the man’s face.

Adam bristles. No one gets under his skin, sees everything underneath, the way Shiro does.

“I am a soldier, Adam. As far as I’m concerned, loyalty is the best characteristic a person can possess. The Captain takes his hand, gently tugs to pull him closer. “You fit that ideal more than anyone I’ve ever met. You’re clever, conniving, brilliant, beautiful-”

“That’s not-”

“It is true,” Shiro insists. “You are many things, and I wonder if you’re actually living up to your true potential.”

Adam licks his lips. Gulps. Melts against Shiro’s encompassing frame. “I am happy with what I’m doing. Though I’m not happy it’s time to leave.”

“It’s probably for the best, though. At least for now. My season is coming up in another movement. It might be a good thing you’re a planet away.”

“Right.” Adam’s edges fit with Shiro’s as best it can despite the size difference between them. “Call me after so I know you’re well, and let me know if I can send you anything.”

“Definitely. I’ll probably be missing your voice anyway. Maybe you could leave something of yours behind for me?”

“Just pick something. Whatever you want.” Adam closes his eyes, wraps his arms around Shiro’s waist. “I’m sorry I can’t give you more. I don’t want to leave you behind bonded to me.”

“I know. I’ll hold out for a day in the future, when one of us finally decides to retire. When we’re old and impotent.”

Adam scoffs. “Like we’ll like that long.” He steps back. “But I’ll look forward to it, just in case… What should we do with our last day?”

“Steal a ship and go for a joyride?” Shiro suggests. “I have something I’d like to show you.”

Adam regards his companion. “Yes, alright.”

“Excellent!”

As he pulls Adam down the hall, he never lets go of his hand. Adam doesn’t let go either.

Lance sighs, finishing the final clasp on his vest. “Can’t believe we’re going from baby joy to lunch with Zarkon. Are we being punished?”

“I’m just surprised he actually wants to see me,” Keith admits, tossing his now ill-fitting vest aside in favor of traditional clothes. He plans to decline a new wardrobe upon his return, at least until he has the kit. There’s no point in wasting materials. “I bet it’s just out of obligation. We’ve been here a phoeb and a half and he hasn’t called upon us yet. Word’s probably reached the people by now. Do I look okay?”

“What do you mean?” Lance asks.

“Do I… I want him to regret it. Throwing me away,” Keith whispers. “I want him to know he made a mistake.”

Lance stares at him for a long moment before kissing his forehead. “If he doesn’t already know, he will. That’s a promise, beloved. As for how you look, you look like a prince of Altea. We can do better, and we will soon, but this will do for now.”

“What does better look like?”

“Like a Galran prince of Altea. Like I said, when we go home, we’ll pick some better colors for you, and get some new jewelry made, and maybe replace this-” Lance points at Keith’s circlet. “-with that comb I gave you.”

Keith smiles, takes a deep breath. “Let’s grab Bruna and Calik. I don’t feel like walking- hi, baby!” BleepBloop scurries in, leaping into Keith’s open arms, wrapping his own arms around the prince’s neck. “Aw, I missed you too. You wanna come make a mess at lunch? Yeah, let’s go.”

“My only real competition,” Lance quips.

Keith cradles his pet, turning to his mate with a grin. “For now.”

Lance gasps, pretending offense. “That goes both ways, beloved!”

The princes mount their elk, returned this quintant by Krolia, hastening them on toward the compound at the top of the mountain. Krolia is waiting for them, smile quiet and subtle, another Galra with cheek and lip piercings standing beside her. “Bashti, take these elk to the stables; make sure they are fed and watered. Your majesties, I have been asked to escort you. His excellency has decided to eat outside today.”

Krolia leads them through halls into a courtyard bearing nothing but a table furnished with food and drink. The edge of the open ceiling is framed by columns, shaded halls beyond. The royal family is already there, Lotor speaking urgently to his father. Krolia leans in to explain.

“One of Captain Shirogane’s men, Haxus, failed to report a few quintants ago. No one has seen him since. This makes forty-seven members of the compound militia. Others have vanished from various fleets and battalions. Zarkon believes they are simply deserters. Lotor disagrees.”

Allura catches sight of them from her seat next to Lotor, face splitting into a grin when she sees her brother. She gets up, hurrying over, throwing her arms around her brother.

“Hi! It’s so good to see you both!”

“Hey! How’s my nibling doing?” Lance pats Allura’s rounding belly.

“Nibling is fine. I’m fine too, in case you were wondering. Lotor is… resisting the urge to commit patricide-”

“Sounds normal.”

“Yes. Romelle is… less fine, but she’s relatively healthy, so that’s something.” Allura tucks a loose curl behind her ear.

“I’m so sorry, ‘Lura.”

“It is what it is.” Allura smiles. “Father’s still looking, but at this point I’m not optimistic.”

“We’ll make sure she’s well taken care of, regardless.” Lance kisses his sister’s cheek, maneuvering carefully around her protruding belly. “Shall we go rescue your dear husband before he runs out of self-restraint?”

“Please and thank you,” Allura agrees. She pulls Keith into a hug. “I’m so glad to see you’re well-”

The prince pounds his fist on the table, making Allura jump. “IT IS NOT NORMAL!!!”

“Son, please. There is political upheaval. The people will adjust.”

Lotor seethes, jabbing a finger at his father. “You are completely-”

“Ah, Crown Prince Lancel, Prince Yorak! Welcome! I apologize for anything you might have overheard. My son and I were just having a disagreement.”

“It’s fine.” Lance waves away the emperor’s apology with a cheerful smile before helping Keith into his chair. “I’m just glad to know I’m not the only one who has the occasional screaming match with their father.”

“Oh, surely you and Alfor get along,” Honerva protests. “You are both so much alike.”

“I know.” Lance’s grin is sheepish as he takes his seat. If he notices the sly curl to the empress consort’s smile, he doesn’t show it. “I fear that’s where the problem lies. Our personalities are quite similar, but our views are quite different.”

“It is always this way with sons,” Honerva sighs. “It is for this reason I hope my sweet daughter is carrying a daughter of her own.”

Keith can feel the way Lance bristles at Honerva’s claim to his sister and nibling. He nudges his mate with his foot under the table.

Allura rescues them from a response. “Son, daughter, neither, either, I care not. If they are healthy and firm in their convictions, I will be satisfied.”

Zarkon grunts. “Better a son. At least let them present as male, so they’ll have better success in conquest.”

“Father, that is wildly archaic.” Lotor glares. “Conquest isn’t everything.”

“Conquest is the foundation for our entire society! If we have no conquest, we have nothing!” the emperor snaps.

Lance sighs. “Just when I think I understand you people…”

“Mnh. Understanding. A powerful thing,” Lotor agrees. “One that our peoples unfortunately struggle to find.” His gaze darts to his father with vicious accuracy.

Keith takes a deep breath, willing no one to start a fight as he starts in on his lunch. He has no real fondness for his uncle or aunt, less so as time goes on, as he processes everything these people have done to him. He meets his cousin’s eyes across the table, a flicker of understanding in his hybrid eyes.

“I’m working on it,” Lance continues, clearly trying to steer conversation. “I have a few ideas, but nothing actionable as of now… What concerns me is the fear. The locals here were terrified of me when I first arrived. It’s taken me my entire stay and a kronil attack to gain their trust, and I’m still not entirely sure that I have it.”

“They trust you,” Keith assures, dropping a kiss to his shoulder.

“Mnh. They did until we got back from your den in the woods and all my scales were glowing red.”

“They what now?” Allura looks up from her lunch, eyeing her brother with bafflement. “Why would they do that?”

When Lance only shrugs, Honerva cuts in. “Your alchemical abilities are unstable, aren’t they?”

Lance nods. Keith rises to his defense. “But improving every day.”

There’s a stretch of awkward silence in the wake of Honerva’s unimpressed look.

“At any rate,” Zarkon says, breaking the silence. “You all have much to learn, including how to be respectful of tradition. The Galra will not be altering their ways to please the Alteans. It’s your duty to make amends.”

“Make amends?” Lance frowns.

“Your people attacked us. Sooner or later, reparations must be paid.”

Lance inhales, ready to snap, but Keith kicks him under the table. The Altean bites his tongue, not willing to put Keith in the line of fire, even indirectly.

“I'm sure we’ll pay in one way or another,” Lance murmurs, thinking of his people’s declining numbers and quality of life. “We both will, I think. Having so much mistrust in your closest neighbor, it’s not good for any of us.”

Zarkon hums, watching Lance eat. He says nothing. No one does.

Keith watches his uncle, observing the way he inspects his mate. He can sense Honerva observing them, too. A glance at his cousin and sister-in-law shows that they’ve both noticed the imperial couple’s fixation on them. He wonders suddenly if his uncle can tell he’s pregnant, is already deciding how to use their kit the moment they’re born. Possibly before, if he can come up with something.

Have they made a mistake?

Keith finds Lance’s hand under the table, guides it to where his blade is concealed at his hip, a silent warning that they might be in danger. Lance laces their fingers together, acknowledging his concerns, promising support.

It only occurs to Keith much later that Lance was extremely careful not to reveal how much authority he has on Altea. He suspects that was for the best.

“So, you’ve seen rivers by now, and rain, and thunderstorms, but have you ever seen a sea?”” Shiro asks.

“I have not. I assume by your tone they are impressive?”

“I find them impressive, so I figure an Altean would as well. And this particular place has sentimental value to me.”

“Very well, then,” Adam sighs, pretending to find the excursion tedious. “Show me.”

Shiro kisses his cheek. “Always so contrary. I’ll settle us a ways back from the shore… This is where I was born, though it was a village at the time. It was destroyed in a skirmish before I lost my first set of teeth.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Mnh. Thank you, but I don’t really remember enough to be sorry myself.”

They both know that’s why Adam is sorry, but neither mentions it.

Shiro settles their ‘borrowed’ craft down on a flat bit of orange rock speckled with green corals, lowers the ramp. Adam takes the Galra’s hand preemptively, finding the action oddly satisfying. “Show me your sea, then. And what’s left of your first home.”

Shiro leads him from the craft, onto a swath of rock formations. The air smells of salt. “Watch your step. It’s just this way. I would have landed closer, but there’s not much more than sand where we’re going. It’s not good for the craft.”

Shiro leads him down the smoothed mounds of stone and around a bend, revealing a view of blue sky and brilliant green lagoon, waves curling over bright yellow sands. There are large, winged reptiles flapping overhead, diving into the water. In the distance, a great beast breaches the water, scales glinting in the sunlight, fins like wings as it sails long over the water.

“Well, here it is. The, um. The headman’s house was over there-” Shiro points their joined hands across the sand to the other side of the lagoon. “And there was a dock in the middle that stretched to the edge of the lagoon and across in both directions. The homes were made of wood and reeds, and they floated on the water.”

“What happened when it stormed?”

“We came ashore and hid in the cave cellars. Or so I’ve been told.” Shiro smiles. “We were a fishing village, and our livelihood came from the sea. Can you imagine it? Me? A fisherman?! But who knows, maybe I would have been good at it. Happy, even.”

“I can’t quite see you sitting on a mat of floating reeds, catching fish,” Adam muses. “I don’t think you could sit still long enough, if fishing actually works as I’ve heard it does.”

“With a stick and a string? Yes, that’s how it works.”

“Definitely not for you.” Adam gazes out at the green water, wind in his hair, salt in his nose, sun on his skin. “Then again, I imagine you would have loved the view. You could fish, and stare at it all day, imagining what’s beneath and on the other side.”

Shiro laughs. “I do think about it! Whenever I find the time to come here, I think about it… I’d like to take you back here, one day. To stay a few quintants, if it’s agreeable to you. I know it’s beneath you, but-”

Adam stops short, turning Shiro to face him. “It’s not. Nothing about you is beneath me, Takashi. Nothing at all. Please, if you believe nothing else, believe that.”

“If you say so.” The soldier gives him a crooked smile before leaning in to kiss him.

For once in his life, Adam decides not to resist change, or even hesitate, choosing instead to drown, to reciprocate. He pours as much into the kiss as he can, trying his best to feel sincere.

He lets their tongues twist, one smooth, one raspy. His fingers curl into the Galra’s short hair as their bodies press close together.

When they finally break apart, because that’s how it always is, Shiro’s gaze is part surprise, part questioning.

“I will miss you, Shiro. Every day.” It’s imperative that Shiro believes him.

“I’ll miss you too. Every day.” The Galra smiles, gray eyes shockingly warm.

Adam turns back to the sea, the waves sighing in his ears. “We should come back here someday. It’s quiet.”

“If ever we both find a day off, we will. But for this quintant, I think we have time for a walk?”

“Yes, we do.”

Grinning, Shiro reclaims his hand, leading him off across the sand, pointing out the remains of some architecture, a net stuck fast in a rockface.

When they return late in the evening, and Adam has time to pack all but the very last of his things, he finds hidden within them a small glass bottle full of bright yellow sand and a few tiny shells.

“Did you put this in here?”

“Yes. It’s a gift. I’ve had it as long as I can remember.”

Adam stares at the bottle, index finger running over a chip in the cork, a scratch in the glass. It’s an incredibly sweet gift, one he hadn’t expected.

“Takashi, will you do something for me?”

“Of course, if I can.”

“Will you- Will you write to me? Writing’s easier than talking.”

“Sure.” Shiro’s hands find his waist. “I look forward to reading what you have to write.”

“And I look forward to more gifts.”

Shiro chuckles. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Adam believes him. He promises himself he’ll reciprocate.

[wlw-imagines-blog]

I Can Say it Without Words | (Peggy Carter x Fem!Reader)

Pairing: Peggy Carter x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Major Character loss, and smut, i guess

Word Count: 2k

Summary: I can make you feel good.

Anon: Hello sweetie!!! I just loooove your blog so much and your writing it’s so pretty!!! But I noticed there’s no Peggy in here :( so I’d like to request the smutish write you can post, my queer ass (I’m still figuring out if I’m Bi or Pan, so let’s say queer/not straight ass) will love you forever!!! Maybe a secret relationship between Reader and Peggy, Peg being sad bc she lost Steve and reader comforting her leading to smut and fluff and love… Pleaseeeeeeeee

A/N: Ask and you shall receive. 

***

Whenever Peggy Carter walked into S.H.I.E.L.D headquarters, the whole room seemed to hold its breath. The women at the switchboards seemed to stop and watch in awe as she sauntered by, skirt skimming their chairs, hat tipped low to cover her eyes. The male agents, looking up from their files and typewriters to cast scornful glances at her, hoping to tear her down with curled lips and narrowed eyes. They were foolish to think so.

When Agent Carter stepped into the office, you felt your heart press into your ribs, creating this nervous, wonderful pressure. Your hands became fidgety; brushing at the hair around your ears, shuffling papers, twisting your fountain pen.

Every woman that worked in the office shared a feeling of pride at how she was unapologetic, combative, even, towards nitwits like Agent Thompson and Agent Dooley. 

As she strolled into the office, head up, shoulders back, you felt a warmth prickle the back of your neck. She wore a dark, navy blue ensemble with a shockingly pink hat, the one you remember being on her desk, the day you were hired to work at S.H.I.E.L.D. 

It had been a cold October evening when Agent Carter interviewed you. Rain was splattering against the windows of her office as she reviewed your resume and criminal record check. The warm lights of the room coaxed you into a strange sense of comfort. You remembered the tight feeling in your stomach, and the sweat on your palms and brow. On her desk was the fucshia hat and plenty of files and paper, all scattered yet organized. What attracted your attention was the only picture frame on her desk. It held the image of a young, sickly blond man, wearing a white t-shirt and dog tags. His resemblance to Captain America was stunning, but, that man was far too small and skinny to be him.

“I’m going to be perfectly honest, Miss. Y/L/N, your resume and letter of recommendation is flawless,” she had said, interrupting your thoughts. “But you have yet to give me a reason as to why you want to join S.H.I.E.L.D. “

Agent Carter’s hair curled perfectly over her shoulder, the dark brown contrasted the cream of her blouse perfectly. Her chocolate eyes bore into you, like she already had you figured out.

You straightened your back. “Agent Carter. All my life, people have told me I did not have the aptitude to become a government agent. I was never smart enough, never strong enough. never man enough.” You resisted the urge to sneer at the word. “Part of me wants to prove myself to the nay-sayers. Another part wants to be a piece of something bigger that just me. But, all of me wants to make a difference, even if its a small one.”

You thought you saw the ghost of a smile on her red lips. Agent Carter stood, smoothing her navy skirt. You stood too, and accepted the hand shake she offered. 

“Miss. Y/L/N, I expect you here at seven a.m, sharp, ready for your training,” Agent Carter’s eyes glinted, clearly excited at your prospects. “Don’t be late.”

As December began, you were still in the preliminary stages of training under Agent Carter’s watchful eye; learning how to operate different firearms, mastering the art of safe-cracking, and properly educating yourself on espionage. 

You adjusted the lapels of your blazer, watching Agent Carter approach you.

“Agent Y/L/N,” She greeted. “Down to the basement, I want to see if you’re still sharp with your gun. Go on ahead, I need to clock in.” 

You nodded before leaning in. “I’d watch out, ma’am, Thompson’s on a rampage this morning; he heard about the promotion Dooley’s planning on giving you.”

Her lips twisted, as though she was fighting back a smile. “Thank you for the heads up, Y/N, I’ll keep my eyes out.”

You grinned and made your way to the practice room, artfully dodging Agent Thompson, who’s nostrils were flared and face was red.

***

“You’re getting better, y/n,” Agent Carter scribbled something down onto a clipboard. “There’s a definite improvement in accuracy. But if your hold it like this-”

She wrapped an arm around you, hand gripping yours. “Keeping your arms steady. Don’t close one eye.”

Peggy’s voice was like honey in your ears, breath hot against your neck. You fought to keep composure. The room was spinning, but you managed to keep your hand steady on the trigger, pointed at the target on the other side of the room.

Her hand rested on your nip, and you could feel the heat radiate through your slacks.

“There,” Agent Carter murmured. “Pull it.”

You pulled the trigger, and shots rang out in the cement room. 

The breathe you were holding escaped in a heavy sigh that you were certain Agent Carter heard.

“Agent Carter?” Dooley’s voice shook the two of you out of your stupor. “I want to talk to you. In my office, now.”

“Thank you, Agent Carter,” you said, unable to look at her.

“Please,” she did not remove her hand from yours. “Call me Peggy.”

You nodded, throat suddenly too tight to speak. Her eyes seemed to say a million things 

Then she was gone.

When you pulled on your jacket to leave for the night, all but one office was dark and empty. Agent Carter was still in her office, sitting behind her desk, cradling the picture frame of the blond man.

“Well,” you murmured. “This isn’t how I expected you to celebrate your big promotion.”

She smiled, still looking down. “How did you expect it?”

“I don’t know; a little gloating, a lot of drinking,” You shrugged. “Maybe some debauchery disguised in the form of dancing.”

She laughed, warm and deep, but incredibly weak. “I’m afraid I don’t dance. Not anymore.”

Her finger traced the glass of the picture, and you nodded. She was not going to open up if your pushed it.

You cleared your throat. “Peggy, I’m planning on going out tonight. Perhaps we can celebrate together? Maybe buy a few drinks and talk?” You probed gently. If she interpreted this as a date, you were either screwed, or getting screwed. 

She finally looked up, and you noticed hoe red and watery her eyes were. Peggy managed to smile. “Are you asking me on a date, Y/N?”

“Maybe,” You leaned against the door frame. “Only if you want me to.”

Peggy seemed to think over her options, she was almost unreadable. “Where do you have in mind?” 

You grinned, offering your hand. I know a place, if you’re ready to party.”

***

“Come on, honey”, you giggled, pulling Peggy along. “This will help you forget about everything.”

Mona’s was a quiet-looking building of red brick with iron bars on blacked out windows. There was a tall, stocky butch out front, hair cropped and gelled back, wearing a striped button down and slacks. She took the cigarette from behind her ear and in one fluid motion, lit it and took a deep drag. It dangled between her lips. 

“Hey, Bonnie,” You grinned at the woman. 

She offered you a coy smile. “Long time no see, Y/N. Who’s this?”

You wrapped an arm around Peggy. “She’s my guest, Bon. Is it alright that she comes in tonight?”

Bonnie sized her up, and Peggy did not back down. She looked Bonnie in the eye, chin raised. You were caught off guard when Peggy winked at her. 

The corner of Bonnie’s mouth raised. “Yeah, she’s good. Come on in.” 

You opened the door, revealing a landing, and two staircases; one that led to upstairs apartments, and one that led to the basement. As the door closed, you faced Peggy in the cramped area. 

“Peggy, I’m sure you’re aware of what kind of pub this is.”

“Honestly, I’m a touch surprised, Y/N.”

You faltered. “Peggy, this is... it’s a-”

“A lesbian bar?” she asked kindly. “I’m alright with it, Y/N. In fact, I’m more alright with it that you would believe.”

“What?”

“You might find this hard to believe, but I’m quite familiar with Mona’s,” She studied her nails, feigning disinterest. “I’m what you might call a frequent patron.”

This information slapped you in the face. Staying silent, you worked through the information as Peggy continued to speak. 

“Y/N, I’m trusting you with this information. No one at S.H.I.E.L.D. can ever find out about the both of us, okay?” 

You snapped out of your daze. “Of course! I’m not a ditz. I know a thing or two about secrecy.”

“Good,” that easy smile returned to her face. “If you’d like, Y/N, we can still have a few drinks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. I still want to celebrate my promotion.”

You grinned, “Lead the way, mademoiselle.”

The bar was a touch dingy, not bringing in enough funds to keep it completely spotless and well lit, but you found a table for yourself and Peggy. You called out to the bartender to send a bottle of the finest champagne. The pub was moderately crowded with other women all chatting and drinking, paying you no mind. The two of you listened to the jazz from the gramophone, drinking and laughing about the goons at the office. 

“It’s infuriating!” Peggy laughed, wiping tears from her eyes. “Thompson wants to be a secretary, not an agent! It felt so good when Dooley gave me the promotion.”

You snickered, champagne sloshing onto the table. “I’ve never seen him so angry.” The bottle was empty, and the clock read one in the morning. “It’s getting late, Peg, I’ve gotta get going. Walk me home?”

The two of you took a cab back to your apartment, and Peggy walked you to the door.

You played with the buttons of her jacket. She swallowed audibly. “So, are you going to invite me in or not?”

The two of you barely made it to the bedroom.

Your lips bumped against Peggy’s neck before latching onto her jaw. You stumbled, pressing her against the bedroom door. 

“All you have to say is yes,” You said softly into her skin. “That’s all I need, Peggy.”

She groaned as your lips stayed so tantalizingly far from her mouth. “Fuck me, Y/N, yes.”

Driven by lust, you pressed your lips to hers, letting Peggy open her mouth at her own pace, coaxing your tongue into her mouth. Her hands roamed down your chest, sliding over your breasts until they found your belt. 

Peggy pulled away, dragging you closer to the bed by the buckle. You were surprised at how breathless you were, panting as she began to unbutton your shirt. You shed it and your trousers quickly, helping her out of her skirt and blouse, sucking a dark hickey onto her collar bone.

She stood there in her lacy, black panties, gasping when your fingers brushed against her breasts.

A hand gripped the back of your head, keeping you in place, tongue lapping at her chest. 

“Fuck,” Peggy groaned. You slipped your hands down her thighs, pressing against the soft flesh of her ass. “Bed. Now.”

You fell on top of her, straddling her waist. Lips brushing against hers, delicate, then rough and filthy. Your hand slowly traveled down Peggy’s chest and navel, resting on her hip. You played with the hem of her panties.

“You’re so beautiful,” Your voice was barely above a whisper. Peggy’s hand gripped your wrist, guiding it beneath her under garment, pulling them off.

As you pressed against her, she let out a shaking gasp. Every movement created a reaction; sometimes quiet, delicious mews, other times they were loud, pleasured moans. 

Your hands never left Peggy, pushing in and out of her tight heat, hooking your fingers to brush against her G spot. When you pulled away, she let out a disappointed noise. 

You replaced your hand with your thigh. You sighed as Peggy shifted her hips, dragging herself over the skin of your thigh, warm and wet. She moved faster and faster, her moans becoming higher and higher.

“Fuck,” she hissed, teeth clenched, arms thrown around your neck. Peggy cried out, falling into pleasure, back arching into you. You collapsed onto her, breathless.

She pressed a messy kiss your forehead before pulling the sheets over the both of you. You wrapped an arm around her waist, resting your head on her shoulder.

“Goodnight, Peg,” you murmured sleepily, nuzzling closer.

She ran a hand through your hair. “Goodnight, love.”

***

A/N: This is long as heck.

[mediaeval-muse]

Book Review

Butterfly Swords. By Jeannie Lin. Toronto and New York: Harlequin, 2010.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Part of a Series? Yes, Tang Dynasty #1

Summary: During China's infamous Tang Dynasty, a time awash with luxury yet littered with deadly intrigues and fallen royalty, betrayed Princess Ai Li flees before her wedding. Miles from home, with only her delicate butterfly swords for defense, she enlists the reluctant protection of a blue-eyed warrior. Battle-scarred, embittered Ryam has always held his own life at cheap value. Ai Li's innocent trust in him and honorable, stubborn nature make him desperate to protect her which means not seducing the first woman he has ever truly wanted.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: violence, sexual content

**DISCLAIMER: I’m not an expert on Chinese history or the Tang Dynasty, so I can’t speak to the book’s historical accuracy. If you’ve read this and have any thoughts, feel free to reach out! I’d love to learn!***

Overview: I decided to give this book a try after seeing praise for the author on Courtney Milan’s website. I’m always in the mood for some non-European historical fiction, and the romance aspect just made this book even more appealing. While there were some things I liked about Butterfly Swords, there were also some things that irritated me, such as the protagonists’ relationship and the focus on traveling. As a result, this book was a middling read for me, but I would be interesting in seeing if (and how) the author improves, as this is, to my understanding, a debut novel.

Writing: Lin’s prose is somewhat matter-of-fact, relating events and emotions in a plain, straight-forward style. At first, I thought the prose rather sparse, but as I progressed through the novel, it became more descriptive, especially once our two protagonists finally admitted (to themselves?) that they had feelings for one another and wanted to engage in a relationship. Because this book takes place in what Lin calls a “sensuous” era (as she discusses in her author’s note), I do wish more of that sensuality came through in her writing style. Because the Tang Dynasty is so temporally removed from our current time, it would have been fun to bring the setting to life more vividly. I would have loved more lush descriptions of what the world and culture was like, and since this book is only 282 pages long, I think there was definitely some room to add more detail.

Plot: The majority of the plot involves Ai Li, our heroine, fleeing from her marriage to a warlord who has betrayed her family. She chances upon Ryam, our hero and lone wandering “barbarian,” and convinces him to act as a kind of bodyguard and escort her back to her father. This premise lasts for maybe half the book, switching to focus on what to do once Ai Li has a falling out with her family (for lack of a better term, without spoiling anything) and how she and Ryam can be together. I found the first half of the book to be a little rocky; the lack of detail about the politics driving this situation made for some confusion, and the looming threat of the warlord’s forces was less suspenseful and more convenient.

The majority of the plot also revolves around Ai Li and Ryam traveling, and personally, I think these kinds of narratives are difficult to do well. Traveling or journeys provide an easy narrative structure, but they lack suspense. Events don’t really build on one another as much as they just happen - characters encounter this village where this event happens, then they continue to this part of the forest, where this happens, and so on. This isn’t necessarily Lin’s fault - it’s a problem I see throughout fiction that structures narrative this way. The threat of the being detected isn’t really felt or, if it is, it can feel repetitive.

I much preferred the moments when Ai Li interacts with her family. Family and honor are priorities for her, and the politics of the book were woven in well with Ai Li’s  personal stakes. Ai Li risks losing her family in multiple ways: by bringing shame to them through her disobedience, by refusing to marry her fiance and creating peace in the empire, by disapproving of her father’s plans regarding her mother, etc. It created interesting tension at both micro and macro levels, and I was pleased that the personal-political conflicts neither framed family and honor as “old fashioned” or necessarily repressive, nor did the story as whole advocate for a complete break from values and traditions. Instead, it explored the delicate balance of obligation vs selfishness, considering the value of honor in a world devoid of it.

Characters: Ai Li, our heroine, is a sword-wielding princess who flees an arranged marriage to a traitorous warlord. She’s impulsive and reckless without being irritating - she acts without thinking mainly when it comes to her desires, and while it does sometimes get her in trouble, I don’t think there were any moments when she did something genuinely stupid to make plot happen. I also liked that she valued honor and her family but not to the extent that she would tolerate immorality from those closest to her. She is somewhat naive in that she had never been in an actual fight and doesn’t quite know how to survive on her own - her disguise is obvious, she can’t concoct convincing lies, and she trusts a bit too easily (hence the need for Ryam), but she’s unafraid to trek out on her own, if she has to.

Ryam, our hero, is a “foreigner” who roams throughout the empire after a disastrous military encounter leaves him on his own. His self-loathing through repeated references to how he was a “barbarian” and not a good person got a little repetitive after a while, and aside from his ability to fight, he didn’t have much going for him. He doesn’t seem to have clear goals or motivations, which made it hard to see why Ai Li was drawn to him until the author tells us that he listens to her and considers what she wants. I wish some more effort was made to make him more interesting, not just a gruff warrior who makes excuses about not being good enough for his love interest.

Supporting characters were more or less fine, playing the role they are meant to play. I really liked the kindness of Ai Li’s grandmother, Ryam’s commander (Adrian), and the former princess Miya. All of them seemed to genuinely care about the people around them, and it was wonderful to see them interact with and offer guidance to the protagonists, who were struggling with sorting out what they wanted.

I didn’t much care for our antagonist, a warlord named Li Tao. He’s somewhat of a boogeyman in that he doesn’t show up in person until the end of the book, making his looming threat somewhat toothless.

Other: I personally found the romance between Ai Li and Ryam to be up and down. While I did like that Ai Li felt that Ryam valued her voice and desires more than anyone else in her life (which Lin definitely should have leaned into more), I ultimately thought the foundation of their relationship was a little weak. From their first meeting, Ai Li and Ryam are physically attracted to one another, which is fine, but Ryam’s constant thinking of how he had to keep his masculine impulses in check was annoying. In addition to Ai Li deciding to trust a man she’s only just met (which seems foolish to me), the two kiss after knowing each other for one day, and only as a reward for Ryam winning a sparring contest. It felt too physical and because their relationship starts out this way, I had a hard time seeing what each character saw and wanted in the other, other than physical attraction. When they started to open up to one another, things got a little better, but the entire book takes place over something like a month, making their eventual union and declaration of love feel rushed. Moreover, even after things got a little more emotional, I still wanted more exploration of how the two enriched each other’s lives. There was a great foundation in that Ryam listened to Ai Li and took her desires (romantic or otherwise) seriously, but Ai Li’s role in making Ryam less self-loathing and more honorable wasn’t quite as interesting or empowering.

The repetitive nature of their budding relationship also made their romance hard to get excited about until the middle/end, when things got more complex. Ryam would constantly work on suppressing his sexual feelings, while Ai Li would talk about her family and her brothers. Then, the two would kiss or do something somewhat sexual, then back off while making excuses about how they could’t be together. Their interactions cycled through this script a few times, which ensured that their relationship didn’t progress as much as it followed a predictable pattern.

Recommendations: I would recommend this book if you’re interested in historical romance, the Tang Dynasty, political conflict, sword-wielding heroines, and romances not set in Europe.

[ianmrid]

Pokémon!

Thanks Baz! I hope nobody is going to expect that quality of article going forward: we are returning to my articles, full of run-on sentences, typos, and inconsistent use of apostrophes.

Anyway, Pokémon Platinum: Completed!

However, unlike in Generation 3, I know I’m not done yet. My Pokédex needs some work, but that is because I have been holding back a few pokémon that I want to use in the other pair games in Gen4; remakes of the Gen2 Johto adventures, HeartGold and SoulSilver!

I am very excited to play these as they are often cited as the best games in the whole Pokémon franchise, so I will be saving my graphs, my top tens, and my artworks until I have wrapped them up, so for now, let’s focus on my Platinum team.

Ziggy the Empoleon: Probably my second-favourite fully-evolved starter this generation, Empoleon has a great typing in Water/Steel, and is just a badass-looking emperor penguin with a trident face! It partly gets its name from Napoleon, and it is even the same height as it’s namesake. Due to the Napoleon connection, my Empoleon was named Ziggy after the scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent adventures where Napoleon goes to the Ziggy Pig restaurant. Unfortunately Ziggy had to carry three of the required HM moves - Defog, Surf, and Waterfall, but on the plus side, Surf and Waterfall are both decent moves in their own right. Finally I added the STAB Steel-type Flash Cannon move and the HP-recovering Shell Bell held item, since with a type combo that already provides a lot of good resistances, this just made Ziggy even harder to take down!

Crocus the Toxicroak: Another interesting new type combo in Fighting/Poison, I really like Toxicroak’s design, and it is nice to see a Frog-based pokémon who doesn’t have to be Water-type. Toxicroak isn’t the strongest pokémon, and gets completely wrecked by Psychic-types, but Crocus still managed to hold her own. I gave her the Fist Plate to hold to power up her Fighting-type STAB Brick Break, and then rounded out actually useful moves with another STAB - Poison Jab - and the Dark-type Sucker Punch which gives some priority that also has the benefit of being super effective against those dangerous Psychic-type opponents. As with every team member in Gen4, the last slot went to an HM - in this case, Cut.

Hodgeheg the Shaymin: A rarity for me; including a Mythical on one of my teams! In fact Shaymin is only the second Mythical I have used, following on from Mew on my Gen1, Pokémon Blue team. I used the event Shaymin from Diamond or Pearl so that I could nickname it - Hodgeheg might not be one of my most inspired, but I like it - and because it was at not too high a level for me to use from early on. Shaymin actually has a second form - Sky Form - which is Grass/Flying, which is accessed when Shaymin holds a Gracedia Flower, but I much prefer the far more adorable Land Form. With the held item slot free, I gave it a Miracle Seed to power up Grass-type moves and loaded its moveset up with those. Seed Bomb for power, Leech Seed and Giga Drain to damage while healing, and Synthesis for pure healing power! Combined with some good stats, Shaymin was very tricky for opponents to take down.

Sukhoi the Garchomp: The pseudo-Legendary of the Sinnoh region, Garchomp is an insanely powerful Dragon/Ground-type and  I named mine Sukhoi after a Fighter Jet, since Garchomp seems to be a sort of land-shark crossed with a plane. I rarely love using these really powerful pokémon, but they often require a lot of levelling up, so when trying to complete the Pokédex, it often makes sense to use them on your team and not have to just level grind them at the end. Sukhoi however, was one of my favourites from this category, partly due to the Ground-typing and my love of using STAB Earthquake on everything. The region’s Champion, Cynthia, also uses a Garchomp as her ace, so it was fun to see who’s was best. (Spoiler: it was mine). I rounded out the move set with STAB Dragon Rush (plus a held Wide Lens to improve that moves shoddy accuracy), Flamethrower for coverage, and of course an HM; Rock Climb.

Blimpy the Drifblim: Blimpy might not be my best nickname, but I never actually planned on using the Ghost/Flying-type Drifblim when I originally caught and named it. I’d ear-marked Rotom for this slot, but I really needed a pokémon that could learn the HM Fly, and Drifblim fits the bill. Luckily, I still really like Drifblim - it’s a bit fragile, which isn’t too surprising given it’s a balloon - but it helps mitigate that with a huge HP stat. I gave Blimpy STAB Shadow Ball, Thunderbolt as some much-needed Electric-type coverage, and also a Wacan Berry to hold. This was useful in reducing damage taken by Electric-type attacks and using it up would also activate the Unburden ability, doubling Blimpy’s Speed for the rest of the battle.

Bangs the Glaceon: Finally, Bangs - named for his Jess-from-New-Girl hairstyle - was another pokémon I didn’t originally plan on using. However, strong Ice-type coverage is just so useful that in the end I decided Glaceon would be the best choice. It is quite late in the game before I could finally evolve my Eevee as you need them up near an Icy Rock, only found near Snow Point City. Once this was done, Bangs just really needed Ice Beam (powered up by an increased chance to land a critical hit through the held Razor Fang) in order to destroy a lot of the Elite Four and the Champion. The other moveslots were given over to the remaining HMs; Strength and Rock Smash, as well as the ever-useful Toxic.

Meet the team:

This was definitely not the exact team I thought I would be using, as both the required TMs and the dire need for some Ice-type coverage - especially when fighting Cynthia - led me down a slightly different path, but I like it when the team grows a little more organically sometimes!

My time in Sinnoh is now drawing to a close, but I’m very excited to head back to Johto and finished off my Gen4 Pokédex - starting with Pokémon HeartGold.

[bemused-writer]

Fanfiction questions: 6, 22, 28, 38!

Thanks for sending this in!

6. List your OTP from each fandom you’ve been involved in.

Oh, so many fandoms.... This won’t include everything by default of there probably being too much but I will list what I can think of! I’ll start with my more current fandoms:

Wei Wuxian/Lan Wanji (The Untamed) - There’s so much I like about these two in the live action. Their loyalty to one another, their growth over the course of the series, and they way they learn to understand one another so well. Other things I really liked was how pleasantly romantic things were between them. The music, the longing, and how they can work together in unison.

Noé/Vanitas (Vanitas no Carte) - I... almost don’t need to say why I like this ship. It’s taken over all my writing. 8D Still, they are such a great balancing act and Mochizuki is writing their adventures so well.... I’m just very impressed. I also really like Jeanne/Dominique but they haven’t gotten much attention in the series yet. :0

Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) - I just love how they’re nontraditional entities, uniquely eccentric, and that while their friendship has spanned centuries they still have new things to learn about one another.

Oz/Echo (Pandora Hearts) - They didn’t get much time together but they were both in a unique position to understand each other’s suffering in a unique way. I really like these two. The one “date” they went on left quite an impression on me; I think if they’d been given the chance they could have really improved one another and brought a special light to each other’s lives. 

Sherlock/Wato (Miss Sherlock) - It’s hard not to ship every version of Holmes and Watson and these two were no exception! I really hope we get a second season but I loved seeing the progression of their relationship in this show and loved how unusual the cases were. Thought they handled things very well.

Eleanor/Tahani (The Good Place) - Honestly, I like all the ships on this show but these two and their kind of background flirting is just great. Love them. 

And now some fandoms I’m a little less active in (at least at the moment):

Dean/Cas (Supernatural) - I don’t know if I’m really holding out for this to happen in canon in any overt kind of way. It’s been long enough since I’ve watched the show that I’ve created a little distance there. Probably for the best. XD Even so, I always thought these two had something special! 

Korra/Asami (Legend of Korra) - I remember watching season 1 and thinking “These two would be cute together but that’s unlikely to happen.” I’m very glad I was proven wrong. They’re just as epic together as I’d hoped!

Ned/Chuck (Pushing Daisies) - Such an ideal couple. They talk things out, they love each other dearly, and they’re both pretty unusual in all kinds of ways.

Yuuko/Watanuki (xxxHolic) - Pretty sure I’m one of the only people shipping this. XD But it is my opinion that Watanuki had feelings for Yuuko that surpassed his feelings for everyone else. Were they reciprocated? I don’t think they were returned romantically, but I ship it all the same.

Kamui/Subaru (X/1999) - I remember, at some point, this ship had a lot of people disliking it. More recent people will use their familial relationship in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle as a reason but back in the day it was just because it got in the way of all the Subaru/Seishirou and Kamui/Fuuma shippers. At any rate, in X/1999 Kamui and Subaru are not related and they are pointedly portrayed as a healthier version of the Seishirou/Subaru relationship. Anyway, I think they would have been really nice with each other and I still need the ending of this series in case CLAMP ever wants to, you know, do that....

Willow/Tara (BTVS) - Before certain events, they were just adorable and also a power couple.

Cain/Riff (Cain Saga/Godchild) - Tragic, loyal, and bizarre. This sums up their relationship and the series pretty well. I’m always moved by these two.

Data/Deanna (Star Trek: TNG) - Probably also the only person shipping this, but you know? It would have been cool. Also, I think I’m probably only supposed to pick one ship per show but Q/Picard is just also incredibly good. 

Miharu/Yoite (Nabari no Ou) - Just everything about these two is great and tragic and awesome.

Cosima/Delphine (Orphan Black) - They had a lot of troubled points in their relationships but they pulled through and that was nice to see.

Louis/Armand (The Vampire Chronicles) - It’s been quite some time since I’ve read this (I’m due for a reread) but I distinctly recall rooting for these two because I was (and am) convinced Lestat isn’t good enough for Louis. I’m not exactly caught up on the series, so maybe I would change my mind but... I don’t know...

I’m forgetting so many....

22. Is there anything you regret writing?

At the moment, no! I had a phase when I was a teen where I regretted writing all of my fanfiction, though. It was a difficult time in general and I just felt like none of it was that good and I shouldn’t have spent so much time on it--it seemed like I should be doing other things and there was just a sense of shame. It’s weird thinking back to that time because I’ve definitely moved past it. Unfortunately, I deleted my fanfic from that era. Now I’m trying to recover it so I can see the progress I’ve made, but there’s been so-so luck in that regard. Anyway, this is why I encourage people to at least keep a copy of whatever it is they do. You might want it in the future even if you don’t at this point in time!

28. If someone were to draw a piece of fanart for your story, which story would it be and what would the picture be of?

Hmmm, I’ve actually been fortunate enough that someone did draw some fanfic for one of my stories! But, this is talking about something that hasn’t been created yet. Honestly, I would love to see art of Jeanne taking down VotBM in The Descent. I feel like that is the best action scene I’ve done to date and there was something just... really awesome about her throwing a sword across a room with pin point accuracy. 8D I’d also like to see art of the characters in The Dark Wanderer (the sequel to that), especially Dominique dressed as the necromancer.

38. Do you use established canon characters or do you create OCs?

Generally speaking, I try to keep with pre-established characters since I figure we’re all reading fanfic to see more of them! However, most stories can’t make it on their own with just those characters. Many plots will be too big to only have that limited number, so I create OCs as well to better serve the story. For example, there are a lot of OCs in my interpretation of Vanitas’s background (Dealing with Monsters) because we haven’t yet seen his backstory. If I didn’t create any OCs, there wouldn’t have been much of a story. XD

[bfxenon]

Google Local Filler Content Isn't Good UX, and Needs Revisions

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book?

I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps.

The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries:

Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need

Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete

Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX

Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about it.

What’s meant by “local filler” content and why is it such a problem?

The above screenshot captures the local pack results for a very specific search for a gastroenterologist in Angels Camp, California. In its effort to show me a pack, Google has scrambled together results that are two-thirds irrelevant to the full intent of my query, since I am not looking for either an eye care center or a pediatrician. The third result is better, even though Google had to travel about 15 miles from my specified search city to get it, because Dr. Eddi is, at least, a gastroenterologist.

It’s rather frustrating to see Google allowing the one accurate specialist to be outranked by two random local medical entities, perhaps simply because they are closer to home. It obviously won’t do to have an optometrist or children’s doctor consult with me on digestive health, and unfortunately, the situation becomes even odder when we click through to the local finder:

Of the twenty results Google has pulled together to make up the first page of the local finder, only two are actually gastroenterologists, lost in the weeds of podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, general MDs, and a few clinics with no clarity as to whether their presence in the results relates to having a digestive health specialists on staff . Zero of the listed gastroenterologists are in the town I’ve specified. The relevance ratio is quite poor for the user and shapes a daunting environment for appropriate practitioners who need to be found in all this mess.

You may have read me writing before about local SEO seeking to build the online mirror of real-world communities. That’s the ideal: ensuring that towns and cities have an excellent digital reference guide to the local resources available to them. Yet when I fact-checked with the real world (calling medical practices around this particular town), I found that there actually are no gastroenterologists in Angels Camp, even though Google’s results might make it look like there must be. What I heard from locals is that you must either take a 25 minute drive to Sonora to see a GI doctor, or head west for an hour and fifteen minutes to Modesto for appropriate care.

Google has yoked itself to AI, but the present state of search leaves it up to my human intelligence to realize that the SERPs are making empty promises, and that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp. This is what a neighbor, primary care doctor, or local business association would tell me if I was considering moving to this community and needed to be close to specialists. But Google tells me that there are more than 23 million organic choices relevant to my requirements, and scores of local business listings that so closely match my intent, they deserve pride of place in 3-packs, Finders and Maps.

The most material end result for the Google user is that they will likely experience unnecessary fatigue wasting time on the phone calling irrelevant doctors at a moment when they are in serious need of help from an appropriate professional. As a local SEO, I’m conditioned to look at local business categories and can weed out useless content almost automatically because of this, but is the average searcher noticing the truncated “eye care cent…” on the above listing? They’re almost certainly not using a Chrome extension like GMB Spy to see all the possible listing categories since Google decided to hide them years ago.

On a more philosophical note, my concern with local SERPs made up of irrelevant filler content is that they create a false picture of local bounty. As I recently mentioned to Marie Haynes:

The work of local businesses (and local SEOs!) derives its deepest meaning from providing and promoting essential local resources. Google’s inaccurate depiction of abundance could, even if in a small way, contribute to public apathy. The truth is that the US is facing a severe shortage of doctors, and anything that doesn’t reflect this reality could, potentially, undermine public action on issues like why our country, unlike the majority of nations, doesn’t make higher education free or affordable so that young people can become the medical professionals and other essential services providers we unquestionably need to be a functional society. Public well-being depends on complete accuracy in such matters.

As a local SEO, I want a truthful depiction of how well-resourced each community really is on the map, as a component of societal thought and decision-making. We’re all coping with public health and environmental emergencies now and know in our bones how vital essential local services have become.

Just how big is the problem of local filler content?

If the SERPs were more like humans, my query for “gastroenterologist Angels Camp” would return something like a featured snippet stating, “Sorry, our index indicates there are no GI Docs in Angels Camp. You’ll need to look in Sonora or Modesto for nearest options.” It definitely wouldn’t create the present scenario of, “Bad digestive system? See an eye doctor!” that’s being implied by the current results. I wanted to learn just how big this problem has become for Google.

I looked at the local packs in 25 towns and cities across California of widely varying populations using the search phrase “gastroenterologist” and each of the localities. I noted how many of the results returned were within the city specified in my search and how many used “gastroenterologist” as their primary category. I even gave Google an advantage in this test by allowing entries that didn’t use gastroenterologist as their primary category but that did have some version of that word in their business title (making the specialty clearer to the user) to be included in Google’s wins column. Of the 150 total data points I checked, here is what I found:

42% of the content Google presented in local packs had no obvious connection to gastroenterology. It’s a shocking number, honestly. Imagine the number of wearying, irrelevant calls patients may be making seeking digestive health consultation if nearly half of the practices listed are not in this field of medicine.

A pattern I noticed in my small sample set is that larger cities had the most relevant results. Smaller towns and rural areas had much poorer relevance ratios. Meanwhile, Google is more accurate as to returning results within the query’s city, as shown by these numbers:

The trouble is, what looks like more of a win for Google here doesn’t actually chalk up as a win for searchers. In my data set, where Google was accurate in showing results from my specified city, the entities were often simply not GI doctors. There were instances in which all 3 results got the city right, but zero of the results got the specialty right. In fact, in one very bizarre case, Google showed me this:

Welders aside, it’s important to remember that our initial Angels Camp example demonstrated how the searcher, encountering a pack with filler listings in it and drilling down further into the Local Finder results for help may actually end up with even less relevance. Instead of two-out-of-three local pack entries being useless to them, they may end up with two-out-of-twenty unhelpful listings, with relevance consigned to obscurity.

And, of course, filler listings aren’t confined to medical categories. I engaged in this little survey because I’d noticed how often, in category after category, the user experience is less-than-ideal.

What should Google do to lessen the poor UX of irrelevant listings?

Remember that we’re not talking about spam here. That’s a completely different headache in Googleland. I saw no instances of spam in my data. The welder was not trying to pass himself off as a doctor. Rather, what we have here appears to be a case of Google weighting location keywords over goods/services keywords, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Google needs to develop logic that excludes extremely irrelevant listings for specific head terms to improve UX. How might this logic work?

1. Google could rely more on their own categories. Going back to our original example in which an eye care center is the #1 ranked result for “gastroenterologist angels camp”, we can use GMB Spy to check if any of the categories chosen by the business is “gastroenterologist”:

Google can, of course, see all the categories, and this lack of “gastroenterologist” among them should be a big “no” vote on showing the listing for our query.

2. Google could cross check the categories with the oft-disregarded business description:

Again, no mention of gastroenterological services there. Another “no” vote.

3. Google could run sentiment analysis on the reviews for an entity, checking to see if they contain the search phrase:

Lots of mentions of eye care here, but the body of reviews contains zero mentions of intestinal health. Another “no” vote.

4. Google could cross check the specified search phrases against all the knowledge they have from their crawls of the entity’s website:

This activity should confirm that there is no on-site reference to Dr. Haymond being anything other than an ophthalmologist . Then Google would need to make a calculation to downgrade the significance of the location (Angels Camp) based on internal logic that specifies that a user looking for a gastroenterologist in a city would prefer to see gastroenterologists a bit farther away than seeing eye doctors (or welders) nearby. So, this would be another “no” vote for inclusion as a result for our query.

5. Finally, Google could cross reference this crawl of the website against their wider crawl of the web:

This should act as a good, final confirmation that Dr. Haymond is an eye doctor rather than a gastroenterologist, even if he is in our desired city, and give us a fifth “no” vote for bringing his listing up in response to our query.

The web is vast, and so is Google’s job, but I believe the key to resolving this particular type of filler content is for Google to rely more on the knowledge they have of an entity’s vertical and less on their knowledge of its location. A diner may be willing to swap out tacos for pizza if there’s a Mexican restaurant a block away but no pizzerias in town, but in these YMYL categories, the same logic should not apply.

It’s not uncommon for Google to exclude local results from appearing at all when their existing logic tells them there isn’t a good answer. It’s tempting to say that solving the filler content problem depends on Google expanding the number of results for which they don’t show local listings. But, I don’t think this is a good solution, because the user then commonly sees irrelevant organic entries, instead of local ones. It seems to me that a better path is for Google to expand the radius of local SERPs for a greater number of queries so that a search like ours receives a map of the nearest gastroenterologists, with closer, superfluous businesses filtered out.

What should you do if a local business you’re promoting is getting lost amid filler listings?

SEO is going to be the short answer to this problem. It’s true that you can click the “send feedback” link at the bottom of the local finder, Google Maps or an organic SERP, and fill out form like this, with a screenshot:

However, my lone report of dissatisfaction with SERP quality is unlikely to get Google to change the results. Perhaps if they received multiple reports…

More practically-speaking, if a business you’re promoting is getting lost amid irrelevant listings, search engine optimization will be your strongest tool for convincing Google that you are, in fact, the better answer. In our study, we realized that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp, and that the nearest one is about fifteen miles away. If you were in charge of marketing this particular specialist, you could consider:

1. Gaining a foothold in nearby towns and cities

Recommend that the doctor develop real-world relationships with neighboring towns from which he would like to receive more clients. Perhaps, for example, he has hospital privileges, or participates in clinics or seminars in these other locales.

2. Writing about locality relationships

Publish content on the website highlighting these relationships and activities to begin associating the client’s name with a wider radius of localities.

3. Expanding the linktation radius

Seek relevant links and unstructured citations from the neighboring cities and towns, on the basis of these relationships and participation in a variety of community activities.

4. Customizing review requests based on customers’ addresses

If you know your customers well, consider wording review requests to prompt them to mention why it’s worth it to them to travel from X location for goods/services (nota bene: medical professionals, of course, need to be highly conversant with HIPPA compliance when it comes to online reputation management).

5. Filling out your listings to the max

Definitely do give Google and other local business listing platforms the maximum amount of information about the business you’re marketing (Moz Local can help!) . Fill out all the fields and give a try to functions like Google Posts, product listings, and Q&A.

6. Sowing your seeds beyond the walled garden

Pursue an active social media, video, industry, local news, print, radio, and television presence to the extent that your time and budget allows. Google’s walled garden, as defined by my friend, Dr. Pete, is not the only place to build your brand. And, if my other pal, Cyrus Shepard, is right, anti-trust litigation could even bring us to a day when Google’s own ramparts become less impermeable. In the meantime, work at being found beyond Google while you continue to grapple with visibility within their environment.

Study habits

It’s one thing for a student to fudge a book report, but squeaking by can become a negative lifelong habit if it isn’t caught early. I’m sure any Google staffer taking the time to actually read through the local packs in my survey would agree that they don’t rate an A+.

I’ve been in local SEO long enough to remember when Google first created their local index with filler content pulled together from other sources, without business owners having any idea they were even being represented online, and these early study habits seem to have stuck with the company when it comes to internal decision making that ends up having huge real-world impacts. The recent title tag tweak that is rewriting erroneous titles for vaccine landing pages is a concerning example of this lack of foresight and meticulousness.

If I could create a syllabus for Google’s local department, it would begin with separating out categories of the greatest significance to human health and safety and putting them through a rigorous, permanent manual review process to ensure that results are as accurate as possible, and as free from spam, scams, and useless filler content as the reviewers can make them. Google has basically got all of the money and talent in the world to put towards quality, and ethics would suggest they are obliged to make the investment.

Society deserves accurate search results delivered by studious providers, and rural and urban areas are worthy of equal quality commitments and a more nuanced approach than one-size-fits all. Too often, in Local, Google is flunking for want of respecting real-world realities. Let’s hope they start applying themselves to the fullest of their potential.

[nutrifami]

Google Local Filler Content Isn't Good UX, and Needs Revisions

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book?

I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps.

The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries:

Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need

Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete

Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX

Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about it.

What’s meant by “local filler” content and why is it such a problem?

The above screenshot captures the local pack results for a very specific search for a gastroenterologist in Angels Camp, California. In its effort to show me a pack, Google has scrambled together results that are two-thirds irrelevant to the full intent of my query, since I am not looking for either an eye care center or a pediatrician. The third result is better, even though Google had to travel about 15 miles from my specified search city to get it, because Dr. Eddi is, at least, a gastroenterologist.

It’s rather frustrating to see Google allowing the one accurate specialist to be outranked by two random local medical entities, perhaps simply because they are closer to home. It obviously won’t do to have an optometrist or children’s doctor consult with me on digestive health, and unfortunately, the situation becomes even odder when we click through to the local finder:

Of the twenty results Google has pulled together to make up the first page of the local finder, only two are actually gastroenterologists, lost in the weeds of podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, general MDs, and a few clinics with no clarity as to whether their presence in the results relates to having a digestive health specialists on staff . Zero of the listed gastroenterologists are in the town I’ve specified. The relevance ratio is quite poor for the user and shapes a daunting environment for appropriate practitioners who need to be found in all this mess.

You may have read me writing before about local SEO seeking to build the online mirror of real-world communities. That’s the ideal: ensuring that towns and cities have an excellent digital reference guide to the local resources available to them. Yet when I fact-checked with the real world (calling medical practices around this particular town), I found that there actually are no gastroenterologists in Angels Camp, even though Google’s results might make it look like there must be. What I heard from locals is that you must either take a 25 minute drive to Sonora to see a GI doctor, or head west for an hour and fifteen minutes to Modesto for appropriate care.

Google has yoked itself to AI, but the present state of search leaves it up to my human intelligence to realize that the SERPs are making empty promises, and that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp. This is what a neighbor, primary care doctor, or local business association would tell me if I was considering moving to this community and needed to be close to specialists. But Google tells me that there are more than 23 million organic choices relevant to my requirements, and scores of local business listings that so closely match my intent, they deserve pride of place in 3-packs, Finders and Maps.

The most material end result for the Google user is that they will likely experience unnecessary fatigue wasting time on the phone calling irrelevant doctors at a moment when they are in serious need of help from an appropriate professional. As a local SEO, I’m conditioned to look at local business categories and can weed out useless content almost automatically because of this, but is the average searcher noticing the truncated “eye care cent…” on the above listing? They’re almost certainly not using a Chrome extension like GMB Spy to see all the possible listing categories since Google decided to hide them years ago.

On a more philosophical note, my concern with local SERPs made up of irrelevant filler content is that they create a false picture of local bounty. As I recently mentioned to Marie Haynes:

The work of local businesses (and local SEOs!) derives its deepest meaning from providing and promoting essential local resources. Google’s inaccurate depiction of abundance could, even if in a small way, contribute to public apathy. The truth is that the US is facing a severe shortage of doctors, and anything that doesn’t reflect this reality could, potentially, undermine public action on issues like why our country, unlike the majority of nations, doesn’t make higher education free or affordable so that young people can become the medical professionals and other essential services providers we unquestionably need to be a functional society. Public well-being depends on complete accuracy in such matters.

As a local SEO, I want a truthful depiction of how well-resourced each community really is on the map, as a component of societal thought and decision-making. We’re all coping with public health and environmental emergencies now and know in our bones how vital essential local services have become.

Just how big is the problem of local filler content?

If the SERPs were more like humans, my query for “gastroenterologist Angels Camp” would return something like a featured snippet stating, “Sorry, our index indicates there are no GI Docs in Angels Camp. You’ll need to look in Sonora or Modesto for nearest options.” It definitely wouldn’t create the present scenario of, “Bad digestive system? See an eye doctor!” that’s being implied by the current results. I wanted to learn just how big this problem has become for Google.

I looked at the local packs in 25 towns and cities across California of widely varying populations using the search phrase “gastroenterologist” and each of the localities. I noted how many of the results returned were within the city specified in my search and how many used “gastroenterologist” as their primary category. I even gave Google an advantage in this test by allowing entries that didn’t use gastroenterologist as their primary category but that did have some version of that word in their business title (making the specialty clearer to the user) to be included in Google’s wins column. Of the 150 total data points I checked, here is what I found:

42% of the content Google presented in local packs had no obvious connection to gastroenterology. It’s a shocking number, honestly. Imagine the number of wearying, irrelevant calls patients may be making seeking digestive health consultation if nearly half of the practices listed are not in this field of medicine.

A pattern I noticed in my small sample set is that larger cities had the most relevant results. Smaller towns and rural areas had much poorer relevance ratios. Meanwhile, Google is more accurate as to returning results within the query’s city, as shown by these numbers:

The trouble is, what looks like more of a win for Google here doesn’t actually chalk up as a win for searchers. In my data set, where Google was accurate in showing results from my specified city, the entities were often simply not GI doctors. There were instances in which all 3 results got the city right, but zero of the results got the specialty right. In fact, in one very bizarre case, Google showed me this:

Welders aside, it’s important to remember that our initial Angels Camp example demonstrated how the searcher, encountering a pack with filler listings in it and drilling down further into the Local Finder results for help may actually end up with even less relevance. Instead of two-out-of-three local pack entries being useless to them, they may end up with two-out-of-twenty unhelpful listings, with relevance consigned to obscurity.

And, of course, filler listings aren’t confined to medical categories. I engaged in this little survey because I’d noticed how often, in category after category, the user experience is less-than-ideal.

What should Google do to lessen the poor UX of irrelevant listings?

Remember that we’re not talking about spam here. That’s a completely different headache in Googleland. I saw no instances of spam in my data. The welder was not trying to pass himself off as a doctor. Rather, what we have here appears to be a case of Google weighting location keywords over goods/services keywords, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Google needs to develop logic that excludes extremely irrelevant listings for specific head terms to improve UX. How might this logic work?

1. Google could rely more on their own categories. Going back to our original example in which an eye care center is the #1 ranked result for “gastroenterologist angels camp”, we can use GMB Spy to check if any of the categories chosen by the business is “gastroenterologist”:

Google can, of course, see all the categories, and this lack of “gastroenterologist” among them should be a big “no” vote on showing the listing for our query.

2. Google could cross check the categories with the oft-disregarded business description:

Again, no mention of gastroenterological services there. Another “no” vote.

3. Google could run sentiment analysis on the reviews for an entity, checking to see if they contain the search phrase:

Lots of mentions of eye care here, but the body of reviews contains zero mentions of intestinal health. Another “no” vote.

4. Google could cross check the specified search phrases against all the knowledge they have from their crawls of the entity’s website:

This activity should confirm that there is no on-site reference to Dr. Haymond being anything other than an ophthalmologist . Then Google would need to make a calculation to downgrade the significance of the location (Angels Camp) based on internal logic that specifies that a user looking for a gastroenterologist in a city would prefer to see gastroenterologists a bit farther away than seeing eye doctors (or welders) nearby. So, this would be another “no” vote for inclusion as a result for our query.

5. Finally, Google could cross reference this crawl of the website against their wider crawl of the web:

This should act as a good, final confirmation that Dr. Haymond is an eye doctor rather than a gastroenterologist, even if he is in our desired city, and give us a fifth “no” vote for bringing his listing up in response to our query.

The web is vast, and so is Google’s job, but I believe the key to resolving this particular type of filler content is for Google to rely more on the knowledge they have of an entity’s vertical and less on their knowledge of its location. A diner may be willing to swap out tacos for pizza if there’s a Mexican restaurant a block away but no pizzerias in town, but in these YMYL categories, the same logic should not apply.

It’s not uncommon for Google to exclude local results from appearing at all when their existing logic tells them there isn’t a good answer. It’s tempting to say that solving the filler content problem depends on Google expanding the number of results for which they don’t show local listings. But, I don’t think this is a good solution, because the user then commonly sees irrelevant organic entries, instead of local ones. It seems to me that a better path is for Google to expand the radius of local SERPs for a greater number of queries so that a search like ours receives a map of the nearest gastroenterologists, with closer, superfluous businesses filtered out.

What should you do if a local business you’re promoting is getting lost amid filler listings?

SEO is going to be the short answer to this problem. It’s true that you can click the “send feedback” link at the bottom of the local finder, Google Maps or an organic SERP, and fill out form like this, with a screenshot:

However, my lone report of dissatisfaction with SERP quality is unlikely to get Google to change the results. Perhaps if they received multiple reports…

More practically-speaking, if a business you’re promoting is getting lost amid irrelevant listings, search engine optimization will be your strongest tool for convincing Google that you are, in fact, the better answer. In our study, we realized that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp, and that the nearest one is about fifteen miles away. If you were in charge of marketing this particular specialist, you could consider:

1. Gaining a foothold in nearby towns and cities

Recommend that the doctor develop real-world relationships with neighboring towns from which he would like to receive more clients. Perhaps, for example, he has hospital privileges, or participates in clinics or seminars in these other locales.

2. Writing about locality relationships

Publish content on the website highlighting these relationships and activities to begin associating the client’s name with a wider radius of localities.

3. Expanding the linktation radius

Seek relevant links and unstructured citations from the neighboring cities and towns, on the basis of these relationships and participation in a variety of community activities.

4. Customizing review requests based on customers’ addresses

If you know your customers well, consider wording review requests to prompt them to mention why it’s worth it to them to travel from X location for goods/services (nota bene: medical professionals, of course, need to be highly conversant with HIPPA compliance when it comes to online reputation management).

5. Filling out your listings to the max

Definitely do give Google and other local business listing platforms the maximum amount of information about the business you’re marketing (Moz Local can help!) . Fill out all the fields and give a try to functions like Google Posts, product listings, and Q&A.

6. Sowing your seeds beyond the walled garden

Pursue an active social media, video, industry, local news, print, radio, and television presence to the extent that your time and budget allows. Google’s walled garden, as defined by my friend, Dr. Pete, is not the only place to build your brand. And, if my other pal, Cyrus Shepard, is right, anti-trust litigation could even bring us to a day when Google’s own ramparts become less impermeable. In the meantime, work at being found beyond Google while you continue to grapple with visibility within their environment.

Study habits

It’s one thing for a student to fudge a book report, but squeaking by can become a negative lifelong habit if it isn’t caught early. I’m sure any Google staffer taking the time to actually read through the local packs in my survey would agree that they don’t rate an A+.

I’ve been in local SEO long enough to remember when Google first created their local index with filler content pulled together from other sources, without business owners having any idea they were even being represented online, and these early study habits seem to have stuck with the company when it comes to internal decision making that ends up having huge real-world impacts. The recent title tag tweak that is rewriting erroneous titles for vaccine landing pages is a concerning example of this lack of foresight and meticulousness.

If I could create a syllabus for Google’s local department, it would begin with separating out categories of the greatest significance to human health and safety and putting them through a rigorous, permanent manual review process to ensure that results are as accurate as possible, and as free from spam, scams, and useless filler content as the reviewers can make them. Google has basically got all of the money and talent in the world to put towards quality, and ethics would suggest they are obliged to make the investment.

Society deserves accurate search results delivered by studious providers, and rural and urban areas are worthy of equal quality commitments and a more nuanced approach than one-size-fits all. Too often, in Local, Google is flunking for want of respecting real-world realities. Let’s hope they start applying themselves to the fullest of their potential.

[camerasieunhovn]

Google Local Filler Content Isn't Good UX, and Needs Revisions

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book?

I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps.

The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries:

Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need

Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete

Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX

Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about it.

What’s meant by “local filler” content and why is it such a problem?

The above screenshot captures the local pack results for a very specific search for a gastroenterologist in Angels Camp, California. In its effort to show me a pack, Google has scrambled together results that are two-thirds irrelevant to the full intent of my query, since I am not looking for either an eye care center or a pediatrician. The third result is better, even though Google had to travel about 15 miles from my specified search city to get it, because Dr. Eddi is, at least, a gastroenterologist.

It’s rather frustrating to see Google allowing the one accurate specialist to be outranked by two random local medical entities, perhaps simply because they are closer to home. It obviously won’t do to have an optometrist or children’s doctor consult with me on digestive health, and unfortunately, the situation becomes even odder when we click through to the local finder:

Of the twenty results Google has pulled together to make up the first page of the local finder, only two are actually gastroenterologists, lost in the weeds of podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, general MDs, and a few clinics with no clarity as to whether their presence in the results relates to having a digestive health specialists on staff . Zero of the listed gastroenterologists are in the town I’ve specified. The relevance ratio is quite poor for the user and shapes a daunting environment for appropriate practitioners who need to be found in all this mess.

You may have read me writing before about local SEO seeking to build the online mirror of real-world communities. That’s the ideal: ensuring that towns and cities have an excellent digital reference guide to the local resources available to them. Yet when I fact-checked with the real world (calling medical practices around this particular town), I found that there actually are no gastroenterologists in Angels Camp, even though Google’s results might make it look like there must be. What I heard from locals is that you must either take a 25 minute drive to Sonora to see a GI doctor, or head west for an hour and fifteen minutes to Modesto for appropriate care.

Google has yoked itself to AI, but the present state of search leaves it up to my human intelligence to realize that the SERPs are making empty promises, and that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp. This is what a neighbor, primary care doctor, or local business association would tell me if I was considering moving to this community and needed to be close to specialists. But Google tells me that there are more than 23 million organic choices relevant to my requirements, and scores of local business listings that so closely match my intent, they deserve pride of place in 3-packs, Finders and Maps.

The most material end result for the Google user is that they will likely experience unnecessary fatigue wasting time on the phone calling irrelevant doctors at a moment when they are in serious need of help from an appropriate professional. As a local SEO, I’m conditioned to look at local business categories and can weed out useless content almost automatically because of this, but is the average searcher noticing the truncated “eye care cent…” on the above listing? They’re almost certainly not using a Chrome extension like GMB Spy to see all the possible listing categories since Google decided to hide them years ago.

On a more philosophical note, my concern with local SERPs made up of irrelevant filler content is that they create a false picture of local bounty. As I recently mentioned to Marie Haynes:

The work of local businesses (and local SEOs!) derives its deepest meaning from providing and promoting essential local resources. Google’s inaccurate depiction of abundance could, even if in a small way, contribute to public apathy. The truth is that the US is facing a severe shortage of doctors, and anything that doesn’t reflect this reality could, potentially, undermine public action on issues like why our country, unlike the majority of nations, doesn’t make higher education free or affordable so that young people can become the medical professionals and other essential services providers we unquestionably need to be a functional society. Public well-being depends on complete accuracy in such matters.

As a local SEO, I want a truthful depiction of how well-resourced each community really is on the map, as a component of societal thought and decision-making. We’re all coping with public health and environmental emergencies now and know in our bones how vital essential local services have become.

Just how big is the problem of local filler content?

If the SERPs were more like humans, my query for “gastroenterologist Angels Camp” would return something like a featured snippet stating, “Sorry, our index indicates there are no GI Docs in Angels Camp. You’ll need to look in Sonora or Modesto for nearest options.” It definitely wouldn’t create the present scenario of, “Bad digestive system? See an eye doctor!” that’s being implied by the current results. I wanted to learn just how big this problem has become for Google.

I looked at the local packs in 25 towns and cities across California of widely varying populations using the search phrase “gastroenterologist” and each of the localities. I noted how many of the results returned were within the city specified in my search and how many used “gastroenterologist” as their primary category. I even gave Google an advantage in this test by allowing entries that didn’t use gastroenterologist as their primary category but that did have some version of that word in their business title (making the specialty clearer to the user) to be included in Google’s wins column. Of the 150 total data points I checked, here is what I found:

42% of the content Google presented in local packs had no obvious connection to gastroenterology. It’s a shocking number, honestly. Imagine the number of wearying, irrelevant calls patients may be making seeking digestive health consultation if nearly half of the practices listed are not in this field of medicine.

A pattern I noticed in my small sample set is that larger cities had the most relevant results. Smaller towns and rural areas had much poorer relevance ratios. Meanwhile, Google is more accurate as to returning results within the query’s city, as shown by these numbers:

The trouble is, what looks like more of a win for Google here doesn’t actually chalk up as a win for searchers. In my data set, where Google was accurate in showing results from my specified city, the entities were often simply not GI doctors. There were instances in which all 3 results got the city right, but zero of the results got the specialty right. In fact, in one very bizarre case, Google showed me this:

Welders aside, it’s important to remember that our initial Angels Camp example demonstrated how the searcher, encountering a pack with filler listings in it and drilling down further into the Local Finder results for help may actually end up with even less relevance. Instead of two-out-of-three local pack entries being useless to them, they may end up with two-out-of-twenty unhelpful listings, with relevance consigned to obscurity.

And, of course, filler listings aren’t confined to medical categories. I engaged in this little survey because I’d noticed how often, in category after category, the user experience is less-than-ideal.

What should Google do to lessen the poor UX of irrelevant listings?

Remember that we’re not talking about spam here. That’s a completely different headache in Googleland. I saw no instances of spam in my data. The welder was not trying to pass himself off as a doctor. Rather, what we have here appears to be a case of Google weighting location keywords over goods/services keywords, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Google needs to develop logic that excludes extremely irrelevant listings for specific head terms to improve UX. How might this logic work?

1. Google could rely more on their own categories. Going back to our original example in which an eye care center is the #1 ranked result for “gastroenterologist angels camp”, we can use GMB Spy to check if any of the categories chosen by the business is “gastroenterologist”:

Google can, of course, see all the categories, and this lack of “gastroenterologist” among them should be a big “no” vote on showing the listing for our query.

2. Google could cross check the categories with the oft-disregarded business description:

Again, no mention of gastroenterological services there. Another “no” vote.

3. Google could run sentiment analysis on the reviews for an entity, checking to see if they contain the search phrase:

Lots of mentions of eye care here, but the body of reviews contains zero mentions of intestinal health. Another “no” vote.

4. Google could cross check the specified search phrases against all the knowledge they have from their crawls of the entity’s website:

This activity should confirm that there is no on-site reference to Dr. Haymond being anything other than an ophthalmologist . Then Google would need to make a calculation to downgrade the significance of the location (Angels Camp) based on internal logic that specifies that a user looking for a gastroenterologist in a city would prefer to see gastroenterologists a bit farther away than seeing eye doctors (or welders) nearby. So, this would be another “no” vote for inclusion as a result for our query.

5. Finally, Google could cross reference this crawl of the website against their wider crawl of the web:

This should act as a good, final confirmation that Dr. Haymond is an eye doctor rather than a gastroenterologist, even if he is in our desired city, and give us a fifth “no” vote for bringing his listing up in response to our query.

The web is vast, and so is Google’s job, but I believe the key to resolving this particular type of filler content is for Google to rely more on the knowledge they have of an entity’s vertical and less on their knowledge of its location. A diner may be willing to swap out tacos for pizza if there’s a Mexican restaurant a block away but no pizzerias in town, but in these YMYL categories, the same logic should not apply.

It’s not uncommon for Google to exclude local results from appearing at all when their existing logic tells them there isn’t a good answer. It’s tempting to say that solving the filler content problem depends on Google expanding the number of results for which they don’t show local listings. But, I don’t think this is a good solution, because the user then commonly sees irrelevant organic entries, instead of local ones. It seems to me that a better path is for Google to expand the radius of local SERPs for a greater number of queries so that a search like ours receives a map of the nearest gastroenterologists, with closer, superfluous businesses filtered out.

What should you do if a local business you’re promoting is getting lost amid filler listings?

SEO is going to be the short answer to this problem. It’s true that you can click the “send feedback” link at the bottom of the local finder, Google Maps or an organic SERP, and fill out form like this, with a screenshot:

However, my lone report of dissatisfaction with SERP quality is unlikely to get Google to change the results. Perhaps if they received multiple reports…

More practically-speaking, if a business you’re promoting is getting lost amid irrelevant listings, search engine optimization will be your strongest tool for convincing Google that you are, in fact, the better answer. In our study, we realized that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp, and that the nearest one is about fifteen miles away. If you were in charge of marketing this particular specialist, you could consider:

1. Gaining a foothold in nearby towns and cities

Recommend that the doctor develop real-world relationships with neighboring towns from which he would like to receive more clients. Perhaps, for example, he has hospital privileges, or participates in clinics or seminars in these other locales.

2. Writing about locality relationships

Publish content on the website highlighting these relationships and activities to begin associating the client’s name with a wider radius of localities.

3. Expanding the linktation radius

Seek relevant links and unstructured citations from the neighboring cities and towns, on the basis of these relationships and participation in a variety of community activities.

4. Customizing review requests based on customers’ addresses

If you know your customers well, consider wording review requests to prompt them to mention why it’s worth it to them to travel from X location for goods/services (nota bene: medical professionals, of course, need to be highly conversant with HIPPA compliance when it comes to online reputation management).

5. Filling out your listings to the max

Definitely do give Google and other local business listing platforms the maximum amount of information about the business you’re marketing (Moz Local can help!) . Fill out all the fields and give a try to functions like Google Posts, product listings, and Q&A.

6. Sowing your seeds beyond the walled garden

Pursue an active social media, video, industry, local news, print, radio, and television presence to the extent that your time and budget allows. Google’s walled garden, as defined by my friend, Dr. Pete, is not the only place to build your brand. And, if my other pal, Cyrus Shepard, is right, anti-trust litigation could even bring us to a day when Google’s own ramparts become less impermeable. In the meantime, work at being found beyond Google while you continue to grapple with visibility within their environment.

Study habits

It’s one thing for a student to fudge a book report, but squeaking by can become a negative lifelong habit if it isn’t caught early. I’m sure any Google staffer taking the time to actually read through the local packs in my survey would agree that they don’t rate an A+.

I’ve been in local SEO long enough to remember when Google first created their local index with filler content pulled together from other sources, without business owners having any idea they were even being represented online, and these early study habits seem to have stuck with the company when it comes to internal decision making that ends up having huge real-world impacts. The recent title tag tweak that is rewriting erroneous titles for vaccine landing pages is a concerning example of this lack of foresight and meticulousness.

If I could create a syllabus for Google’s local department, it would begin with separating out categories of the greatest significance to human health and safety and putting them through a rigorous, permanent manual review process to ensure that results are as accurate as possible, and as free from spam, scams, and useless filler content as the reviewers can make them. Google has basically got all of the money and talent in the world to put towards quality, and ethics would suggest they are obliged to make the investment.

Society deserves accurate search results delivered by studious providers, and rural and urban areas are worthy of equal quality commitments and a more nuanced approach than one-size-fits all. Too often, in Local, Google is flunking for want of respecting real-world realities. Let’s hope they start applying themselves to the fullest of their potential.

[ductrungnguyen87]

Google Local Filler Content Isn't Good UX, and Needs Revisions

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book?

I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps.

The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries:

Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need

Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete

Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX

Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about it.

What’s meant by “local filler” content and why is it such a problem?

The above screenshot captures the local pack results for a very specific search for a gastroenterologist in Angels Camp, California. In its effort to show me a pack, Google has scrambled together results that are two-thirds irrelevant to the full intent of my query, since I am not looking for either an eye care center or a pediatrician. The third result is better, even though Google had to travel about 15 miles from my specified search city to get it, because Dr. Eddi is, at least, a gastroenterologist.

It’s rather frustrating to see Google allowing the one accurate specialist to be outranked by two random local medical entities, perhaps simply because they are closer to home. It obviously won’t do to have an optometrist or children’s doctor consult with me on digestive health, and unfortunately, the situation becomes even odder when we click through to the local finder:

Of the twenty results Google has pulled together to make up the first page of the local finder, only two are actually gastroenterologists, lost in the weeds of podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, general MDs, and a few clinics with no clarity as to whether their presence in the results relates to having a digestive health specialists on staff . Zero of the listed gastroenterologists are in the town I’ve specified. The relevance ratio is quite poor for the user and shapes a daunting environment for appropriate practitioners who need to be found in all this mess.

You may have read me writing before about local SEO seeking to build the online mirror of real-world communities. That’s the ideal: ensuring that towns and cities have an excellent digital reference guide to the local resources available to them. Yet when I fact-checked with the real world (calling medical practices around this particular town), I found that there actually are no gastroenterologists in Angels Camp, even though Google’s results might make it look like there must be. What I heard from locals is that you must either take a 25 minute drive to Sonora to see a GI doctor, or head west for an hour and fifteen minutes to Modesto for appropriate care.

Google has yoked itself to AI, but the present state of search leaves it up to my human intelligence to realize that the SERPs are making empty promises, and that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp. This is what a neighbor, primary care doctor, or local business association would tell me if I was considering moving to this community and needed to be close to specialists. But Google tells me that there are more than 23 million organic choices relevant to my requirements, and scores of local business listings that so closely match my intent, they deserve pride of place in 3-packs, Finders and Maps.

The most material end result for the Google user is that they will likely experience unnecessary fatigue wasting time on the phone calling irrelevant doctors at a moment when they are in serious need of help from an appropriate professional. As a local SEO, I’m conditioned to look at local business categories and can weed out useless content almost automatically because of this, but is the average searcher noticing the truncated “eye care cent…” on the above listing? They’re almost certainly not using a Chrome extension like GMB Spy to see all the possible listing categories since Google decided to hide them years ago.

On a more philosophical note, my concern with local SERPs made up of irrelevant filler content is that they create a false picture of local bounty. As I recently mentioned to Marie Haynes:

The work of local businesses (and local SEOs!) derives its deepest meaning from providing and promoting essential local resources. Google’s inaccurate depiction of abundance could, even if in a small way, contribute to public apathy. The truth is that the US is facing a severe shortage of doctors, and anything that doesn’t reflect this reality could, potentially, undermine public action on issues like why our country, unlike the majority of nations, doesn’t make higher education free or affordable so that young people can become the medical professionals and other essential services providers we unquestionably need to be a functional society. Public well-being depends on complete accuracy in such matters.

As a local SEO, I want a truthful depiction of how well-resourced each community really is on the map, as a component of societal thought and decision-making. We’re all coping with public health and environmental emergencies now and know in our bones how vital essential local services have become.

Just how big is the problem of local filler content?

If the SERPs were more like humans, my query for “gastroenterologist Angels Camp” would return something like a featured snippet stating, “Sorry, our index indicates there are no GI Docs in Angels Camp. You’ll need to look in Sonora or Modesto for nearest options.” It definitely wouldn’t create the present scenario of, “Bad digestive system? See an eye doctor!” that’s being implied by the current results. I wanted to learn just how big this problem has become for Google.

I looked at the local packs in 25 towns and cities across California of widely varying populations using the search phrase “gastroenterologist” and each of the localities. I noted how many of the results returned were within the city specified in my search and how many used “gastroenterologist” as their primary category. I even gave Google an advantage in this test by allowing entries that didn’t use gastroenterologist as their primary category but that did have some version of that word in their business title (making the specialty clearer to the user) to be included in Google’s wins column. Of the 150 total data points I checked, here is what I found:

42% of the content Google presented in local packs had no obvious connection to gastroenterology. It’s a shocking number, honestly. Imagine the number of wearying, irrelevant calls patients may be making seeking digestive health consultation if nearly half of the practices listed are not in this field of medicine.

A pattern I noticed in my small sample set is that larger cities had the most relevant results. Smaller towns and rural areas had much poorer relevance ratios. Meanwhile, Google is more accurate as to returning results within the query’s city, as shown by these numbers:

The trouble is, what looks like more of a win for Google here doesn’t actually chalk up as a win for searchers. In my data set, where Google was accurate in showing results from my specified city, the entities were often simply not GI doctors. There were instances in which all 3 results got the city right, but zero of the results got the specialty right. In fact, in one very bizarre case, Google showed me this:

Welders aside, it’s important to remember that our initial Angels Camp example demonstrated how the searcher, encountering a pack with filler listings in it and drilling down further into the Local Finder results for help may actually end up with even less relevance. Instead of two-out-of-three local pack entries being useless to them, they may end up with two-out-of-twenty unhelpful listings, with relevance consigned to obscurity.

And, of course, filler listings aren’t confined to medical categories. I engaged in this little survey because I’d noticed how often, in category after category, the user experience is less-than-ideal.

What should Google do to lessen the poor UX of irrelevant listings?

Remember that we’re not talking about spam here. That’s a completely different headache in Googleland. I saw no instances of spam in my data. The welder was not trying to pass himself off as a doctor. Rather, what we have here appears to be a case of Google weighting location keywords over goods/services keywords, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Google needs to develop logic that excludes extremely irrelevant listings for specific head terms to improve UX. How might this logic work?

1. Google could rely more on their own categories. Going back to our original example in which an eye care center is the #1 ranked result for “gastroenterologist angels camp”, we can use GMB Spy to check if any of the categories chosen by the business is “gastroenterologist”:

Google can, of course, see all the categories, and this lack of “gastroenterologist” among them should be a big “no” vote on showing the listing for our query.

2. Google could cross check the categories with the oft-disregarded business description:

Again, no mention of gastroenterological services there. Another “no” vote.

3. Google could run sentiment analysis on the reviews for an entity, checking to see if they contain the search phrase:

Lots of mentions of eye care here, but the body of reviews contains zero mentions of intestinal health. Another “no” vote.

4. Google could cross check the specified search phrases against all the knowledge they have from their crawls of the entity’s website:

This activity should confirm that there is no on-site reference to Dr. Haymond being anything other than an ophthalmologist . Then Google would need to make a calculation to downgrade the significance of the location (Angels Camp) based on internal logic that specifies that a user looking for a gastroenterologist in a city would prefer to see gastroenterologists a bit farther away than seeing eye doctors (or welders) nearby. So, this would be another “no” vote for inclusion as a result for our query.

5. Finally, Google could cross reference this crawl of the website against their wider crawl of the web:

This should act as a good, final confirmation that Dr. Haymond is an eye doctor rather than a gastroenterologist, even if he is in our desired city, and give us a fifth “no” vote for bringing his listing up in response to our query.

The web is vast, and so is Google’s job, but I believe the key to resolving this particular type of filler content is for Google to rely more on the knowledge they have of an entity’s vertical and less on their knowledge of its location. A diner may be willing to swap out tacos for pizza if there’s a Mexican restaurant a block away but no pizzerias in town, but in these YMYL categories, the same logic should not apply.

It’s not uncommon for Google to exclude local results from appearing at all when their existing logic tells them there isn’t a good answer. It’s tempting to say that solving the filler content problem depends on Google expanding the number of results for which they don’t show local listings. But, I don’t think this is a good solution, because the user then commonly sees irrelevant organic entries, instead of local ones. It seems to me that a better path is for Google to expand the radius of local SERPs for a greater number of queries so that a search like ours receives a map of the nearest gastroenterologists, with closer, superfluous businesses filtered out.

What should you do if a local business you’re promoting is getting lost amid filler listings?

SEO is going to be the short answer to this problem. It’s true that you can click the “send feedback” link at the bottom of the local finder, Google Maps or an organic SERP, and fill out form like this, with a screenshot:

However, my lone report of dissatisfaction with SERP quality is unlikely to get Google to change the results. Perhaps if they received multiple reports…

More practically-speaking, if a business you’re promoting is getting lost amid irrelevant listings, search engine optimization will be your strongest tool for convincing Google that you are, in fact, the better answer. In our study, we realized that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp, and that the nearest one is about fifteen miles away. If you were in charge of marketing this particular specialist, you could consider:

1. Gaining a foothold in nearby towns and cities

Recommend that the doctor develop real-world relationships with neighboring towns from which he would like to receive more clients. Perhaps, for example, he has hospital privileges, or participates in clinics or seminars in these other locales.

2. Writing about locality relationships

Publish content on the website highlighting these relationships and activities to begin associating the client’s name with a wider radius of localities.

3. Expanding the linktation radius

Seek relevant links and unstructured citations from the neighboring cities and towns, on the basis of these relationships and participation in a variety of community activities.

4. Customizing review requests based on customers’ addresses

If you know your customers well, consider wording review requests to prompt them to mention why it’s worth it to them to travel from X location for goods/services (nota bene: medical professionals, of course, need to be highly conversant with HIPPA compliance when it comes to online reputation management).

5. Filling out your listings to the max

Definitely do give Google and other local business listing platforms the maximum amount of information about the business you’re marketing (Moz Local can help!) . Fill out all the fields and give a try to functions like Google Posts, product listings, and Q&A.

6. Sowing your seeds beyond the walled garden

Pursue an active social media, video, industry, local news, print, radio, and television presence to the extent that your time and budget allows. Google’s walled garden, as defined by my friend, Dr. Pete, is not the only place to build your brand. And, if my other pal, Cyrus Shepard, is right, anti-trust litigation could even bring us to a day when Google’s own ramparts become less impermeable. In the meantime, work at being found beyond Google while you continue to grapple with visibility within their environment.

Study habits

It’s one thing for a student to fudge a book report, but squeaking by can become a negative lifelong habit if it isn’t caught early. I’m sure any Google staffer taking the time to actually read through the local packs in my survey would agree that they don’t rate an A+.

I’ve been in local SEO long enough to remember when Google first created their local index with filler content pulled together from other sources, without business owners having any idea they were even being represented online, and these early study habits seem to have stuck with the company when it comes to internal decision making that ends up having huge real-world impacts. The recent title tag tweak that is rewriting erroneous titles for vaccine landing pages is a concerning example of this lack of foresight and meticulousness.

If I could create a syllabus for Google’s local department, it would begin with separating out categories of the greatest significance to human health and safety and putting them through a rigorous, permanent manual review process to ensure that results are as accurate as possible, and as free from spam, scams, and useless filler content as the reviewers can make them. Google has basically got all of the money and talent in the world to put towards quality, and ethics would suggest they are obliged to make the investment.

Society deserves accurate search results delivered by studious providers, and rural and urban areas are worthy of equal quality commitments and a more nuanced approach than one-size-fits all. Too often, in Local, Google is flunking for want of respecting real-world realities. Let’s hope they start applying themselves to the fullest of their potential.

[gamebazu]

Google Local Filler Content Isn't Good UX, and Needs Revisions

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book?

I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps.

The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries:

Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need

Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete

Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX

Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about it.

What’s meant by “local filler” content and why is it such a problem?

The above screenshot captures the local pack results for a very specific search for a gastroenterologist in Angels Camp, California. In its effort to show me a pack, Google has scrambled together results that are two-thirds irrelevant to the full intent of my query, since I am not looking for either an eye care center or a pediatrician. The third result is better, even though Google had to travel about 15 miles from my specified search city to get it, because Dr. Eddi is, at least, a gastroenterologist.

It’s rather frustrating to see Google allowing the one accurate specialist to be outranked by two random local medical entities, perhaps simply because they are closer to home. It obviously won’t do to have an optometrist or children’s doctor consult with me on digestive health, and unfortunately, the situation becomes even odder when we click through to the local finder:

Of the twenty results Google has pulled together to make up the first page of the local finder, only two are actually gastroenterologists, lost in the weeds of podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, general MDs, and a few clinics with no clarity as to whether their presence in the results relates to having a digestive health specialists on staff . Zero of the listed gastroenterologists are in the town I’ve specified. The relevance ratio is quite poor for the user and shapes a daunting environment for appropriate practitioners who need to be found in all this mess.

You may have read me writing before about local SEO seeking to build the online mirror of real-world communities. That’s the ideal: ensuring that towns and cities have an excellent digital reference guide to the local resources available to them. Yet when I fact-checked with the real world (calling medical practices around this particular town), I found that there actually are no gastroenterologists in Angels Camp, even though Google’s results might make it look like there must be. What I heard from locals is that you must either take a 25 minute drive to Sonora to see a GI doctor, or head west for an hour and fifteen minutes to Modesto for appropriate care.

Google has yoked itself to AI, but the present state of search leaves it up to my human intelligence to realize that the SERPs are making empty promises, and that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp. This is what a neighbor, primary care doctor, or local business association would tell me if I was considering moving to this community and needed to be close to specialists. But Google tells me that there are more than 23 million organic choices relevant to my requirements, and scores of local business listings that so closely match my intent, they deserve pride of place in 3-packs, Finders and Maps.

The most material end result for the Google user is that they will likely experience unnecessary fatigue wasting time on the phone calling irrelevant doctors at a moment when they are in serious need of help from an appropriate professional. As a local SEO, I’m conditioned to look at local business categories and can weed out useless content almost automatically because of this, but is the average searcher noticing the truncated “eye care cent…” on the above listing? They’re almost certainly not using a Chrome extension like GMB Spy to see all the possible listing categories since Google decided to hide them years ago.

On a more philosophical note, my concern with local SERPs made up of irrelevant filler content is that they create a false picture of local bounty. As I recently mentioned to Marie Haynes:

The work of local businesses (and local SEOs!) derives its deepest meaning from providing and promoting essential local resources. Google’s inaccurate depiction of abundance could, even if in a small way, contribute to public apathy. The truth is that the US is facing a severe shortage of doctors, and anything that doesn’t reflect this reality could, potentially, undermine public action on issues like why our country, unlike the majority of nations, doesn’t make higher education free or affordable so that young people can become the medical professionals and other essential services providers we unquestionably need to be a functional society. Public well-being depends on complete accuracy in such matters.

As a local SEO, I want a truthful depiction of how well-resourced each community really is on the map, as a component of societal thought and decision-making. We’re all coping with public health and environmental emergencies now and know in our bones how vital essential local services have become.

Just how big is the problem of local filler content?

If the SERPs were more like humans, my query for “gastroenterologist Angels Camp” would return something like a featured snippet stating, “Sorry, our index indicates there are no GI Docs in Angels Camp. You’ll need to look in Sonora or Modesto for nearest options.” It definitely wouldn’t create the present scenario of, “Bad digestive system? See an eye doctor!” that’s being implied by the current results. I wanted to learn just how big this problem has become for Google.

I looked at the local packs in 25 towns and cities across California of widely varying populations using the search phrase “gastroenterologist” and each of the localities. I noted how many of the results returned were within the city specified in my search and how many used “gastroenterologist” as their primary category. I even gave Google an advantage in this test by allowing entries that didn’t use gastroenterologist as their primary category but that did have some version of that word in their business title (making the specialty clearer to the user) to be included in Google’s wins column. Of the 150 total data points I checked, here is what I found:

42% of the content Google presented in local packs had no obvious connection to gastroenterology. It’s a shocking number, honestly. Imagine the number of wearying, irrelevant calls patients may be making seeking digestive health consultation if nearly half of the practices listed are not in this field of medicine.

A pattern I noticed in my small sample set is that larger cities had the most relevant results. Smaller towns and rural areas had much poorer relevance ratios. Meanwhile, Google is more accurate as to returning results within the query’s city, as shown by these numbers:

The trouble is, what looks like more of a win for Google here doesn’t actually chalk up as a win for searchers. In my data set, where Google was accurate in showing results from my specified city, the entities were often simply not GI doctors. There were instances in which all 3 results got the city right, but zero of the results got the specialty right. In fact, in one very bizarre case, Google showed me this:

Welders aside, it’s important to remember that our initial Angels Camp example demonstrated how the searcher, encountering a pack with filler listings in it and drilling down further into the Local Finder results for help may actually end up with even less relevance. Instead of two-out-of-three local pack entries being useless to them, they may end up with two-out-of-twenty unhelpful listings, with relevance consigned to obscurity.

And, of course, filler listings aren’t confined to medical categories. I engaged in this little survey because I’d noticed how often, in category after category, the user experience is less-than-ideal.

What should Google do to lessen the poor UX of irrelevant listings?

Remember that we’re not talking about spam here. That’s a completely different headache in Googleland. I saw no instances of spam in my data. The welder was not trying to pass himself off as a doctor. Rather, what we have here appears to be a case of Google weighting location keywords over goods/services keywords, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Google needs to develop logic that excludes extremely irrelevant listings for specific head terms to improve UX. How might this logic work?

1. Google could rely more on their own categories. Going back to our original example in which an eye care center is the #1 ranked result for “gastroenterologist angels camp”, we can use GMB Spy to check if any of the categories chosen by the business is “gastroenterologist”:

Google can, of course, see all the categories, and this lack of “gastroenterologist” among them should be a big “no” vote on showing the listing for our query.

2. Google could cross check the categories with the oft-disregarded business description:

Again, no mention of gastroenterological services there. Another “no” vote.

3. Google could run sentiment analysis on the reviews for an entity, checking to see if they contain the search phrase:

Lots of mentions of eye care here, but the body of reviews contains zero mentions of intestinal health. Another “no” vote.

4. Google could cross check the specified search phrases against all the knowledge they have from their crawls of the entity’s website:

This activity should confirm that there is no on-site reference to Dr. Haymond being anything other than an ophthalmologist . Then Google would need to make a calculation to downgrade the significance of the location (Angels Camp) based on internal logic that specifies that a user looking for a gastroenterologist in a city would prefer to see gastroenterologists a bit farther away than seeing eye doctors (or welders) nearby. So, this would be another “no” vote for inclusion as a result for our query.

5. Finally, Google could cross reference this crawl of the website against their wider crawl of the web:

This should act as a good, final confirmation that Dr. Haymond is an eye doctor rather than a gastroenterologist, even if he is in our desired city, and give us a fifth “no” vote for bringing his listing up in response to our query.

The web is vast, and so is Google’s job, but I believe the key to resolving this particular type of filler content is for Google to rely more on the knowledge they have of an entity’s vertical and less on their knowledge of its location. A diner may be willing to swap out tacos for pizza if there’s a Mexican restaurant a block away but no pizzerias in town, but in these YMYL categories, the same logic should not apply.

It’s not uncommon for Google to exclude local results from appearing at all when their existing logic tells them there isn’t a good answer. It’s tempting to say that solving the filler content problem depends on Google expanding the number of results for which they don’t show local listings. But, I don’t think this is a good solution, because the user then commonly sees irrelevant organic entries, instead of local ones. It seems to me that a better path is for Google to expand the radius of local SERPs for a greater number of queries so that a search like ours receives a map of the nearest gastroenterologists, with closer, superfluous businesses filtered out.

What should you do if a local business you’re promoting is getting lost amid filler listings?

SEO is going to be the short answer to this problem. It’s true that you can click the “send feedback” link at the bottom of the local finder, Google Maps or an organic SERP, and fill out form like this, with a screenshot:

However, my lone report of dissatisfaction with SERP quality is unlikely to get Google to change the results. Perhaps if they received multiple reports…

More practically-speaking, if a business you’re promoting is getting lost amid irrelevant listings, search engine optimization will be your strongest tool for convincing Google that you are, in fact, the better answer. In our study, we realized that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp, and that the nearest one is about fifteen miles away. If you were in charge of marketing this particular specialist, you could consider:

1. Gaining a foothold in nearby towns and cities

Recommend that the doctor develop real-world relationships with neighboring towns from which he would like to receive more clients. Perhaps, for example, he has hospital privileges, or participates in clinics or seminars in these other locales.

2. Writing about locality relationships

Publish content on the website highlighting these relationships and activities to begin associating the client’s name with a wider radius of localities.

3. Expanding the linktation radius

Seek relevant links and unstructured citations from the neighboring cities and towns, on the basis of these relationships and participation in a variety of community activities.

4. Customizing review requests based on customers’ addresses

If you know your customers well, consider wording review requests to prompt them to mention why it’s worth it to them to travel from X location for goods/services (nota bene: medical professionals, of course, need to be highly conversant with HIPPA compliance when it comes to online reputation management).

5. Filling out your listings to the max

Definitely do give Google and other local business listing platforms the maximum amount of information about the business you’re marketing (Moz Local can help!) . Fill out all the fields and give a try to functions like Google Posts, product listings, and Q&A.

6. Sowing your seeds beyond the walled garden

Pursue an active social media, video, industry, local news, print, radio, and television presence to the extent that your time and budget allows. Google’s walled garden, as defined by my friend, Dr. Pete, is not the only place to build your brand. And, if my other pal, Cyrus Shepard, is right, anti-trust litigation could even bring us to a day when Google’s own ramparts become less impermeable. In the meantime, work at being found beyond Google while you continue to grapple with visibility within their environment.

Study habits

It’s one thing for a student to fudge a book report, but squeaking by can become a negative lifelong habit if it isn’t caught early. I’m sure any Google staffer taking the time to actually read through the local packs in my survey would agree that they don’t rate an A+.

I’ve been in local SEO long enough to remember when Google first created their local index with filler content pulled together from other sources, without business owners having any idea they were even being represented online, and these early study habits seem to have stuck with the company when it comes to internal decision making that ends up having huge real-world impacts. The recent title tag tweak that is rewriting erroneous titles for vaccine landing pages is a concerning example of this lack of foresight and meticulousness.

If I could create a syllabus for Google’s local department, it would begin with separating out categories of the greatest significance to human health and safety and putting them through a rigorous, permanent manual review process to ensure that results are as accurate as possible, and as free from spam, scams, and useless filler content as the reviewers can make them. Google has basically got all of the money and talent in the world to put towards quality, and ethics would suggest they are obliged to make the investment.

Society deserves accurate search results delivered by studious providers, and rural and urban areas are worthy of equal quality commitments and a more nuanced approach than one-size-fits all. Too often, in Local, Google is flunking for want of respecting real-world realities. Let’s hope they start applying themselves to the fullest of their potential.

https://ift.tt/3m9axt0

[noithatotoaz]

Google Local Filler Content Isn't Good UX, and Needs Revisions

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book?

I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps.

The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries:

Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need

Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete

Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX

Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about it.

What’s meant by “local filler” content and why is it such a problem?

The above screenshot captures the local pack results for a very specific search for a gastroenterologist in Angels Camp, California. In its effort to show me a pack, Google has scrambled together results that are two-thirds irrelevant to the full intent of my query, since I am not looking for either an eye care center or a pediatrician. The third result is better, even though Google had to travel about 15 miles from my specified search city to get it, because Dr. Eddi is, at least, a gastroenterologist.

It’s rather frustrating to see Google allowing the one accurate specialist to be outranked by two random local medical entities, perhaps simply because they are closer to home. It obviously won’t do to have an optometrist or children’s doctor consult with me on digestive health, and unfortunately, the situation becomes even odder when we click through to the local finder:

Of the twenty results Google has pulled together to make up the first page of the local finder, only two are actually gastroenterologists, lost in the weeds of podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, general MDs, and a few clinics with no clarity as to whether their presence in the results relates to having a digestive health specialists on staff . Zero of the listed gastroenterologists are in the town I’ve specified. The relevance ratio is quite poor for the user and shapes a daunting environment for appropriate practitioners who need to be found in all this mess.

You may have read me writing before about local SEO seeking to build the online mirror of real-world communities. That’s the ideal: ensuring that towns and cities have an excellent digital reference guide to the local resources available to them. Yet when I fact-checked with the real world (calling medical practices around this particular town), I found that there actually are no gastroenterologists in Angels Camp, even though Google’s results might make it look like there must be. What I heard from locals is that you must either take a 25 minute drive to Sonora to see a GI doctor, or head west for an hour and fifteen minutes to Modesto for appropriate care.

Google has yoked itself to AI, but the present state of search leaves it up to my human intelligence to realize that the SERPs are making empty promises, and that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp. This is what a neighbor, primary care doctor, or local business association would tell me if I was considering moving to this community and needed to be close to specialists. But Google tells me that there are more than 23 million organic choices relevant to my requirements, and scores of local business listings that so closely match my intent, they deserve pride of place in 3-packs, Finders and Maps.

The most material end result for the Google user is that they will likely experience unnecessary fatigue wasting time on the phone calling irrelevant doctors at a moment when they are in serious need of help from an appropriate professional. As a local SEO, I’m conditioned to look at local business categories and can weed out useless content almost automatically because of this, but is the average searcher noticing the truncated “eye care cent…” on the above listing? They’re almost certainly not using a Chrome extension like GMB Spy to see all the possible listing categories since Google decided to hide them years ago.

On a more philosophical note, my concern with local SERPs made up of irrelevant filler content is that they create a false picture of local bounty. As I recently mentioned to Marie Haynes:

The work of local businesses (and local SEOs!) derives its deepest meaning from providing and promoting essential local resources. Google’s inaccurate depiction of abundance could, even if in a small way, contribute to public apathy. The truth is that the US is facing a severe shortage of doctors, and anything that doesn’t reflect this reality could, potentially, undermine public action on issues like why our country, unlike the majority of nations, doesn’t make higher education free or affordable so that young people can become the medical professionals and other essential services providers we unquestionably need to be a functional society. Public well-being depends on complete accuracy in such matters.

As a local SEO, I want a truthful depiction of how well-resourced each community really is on the map, as a component of societal thought and decision-making. We’re all coping with public health and environmental emergencies now and know in our bones how vital essential local services have become.

Just how big is the problem of local filler content?

If the SERPs were more like humans, my query for “gastroenterologist Angels Camp” would return something like a featured snippet stating, “Sorry, our index indicates there are no GI Docs in Angels Camp. You’ll need to look in Sonora or Modesto for nearest options.” It definitely wouldn’t create the present scenario of, “Bad digestive system? See an eye doctor!” that’s being implied by the current results. I wanted to learn just how big this problem has become for Google.

I looked at the local packs in 25 towns and cities across California of widely varying populations using the search phrase “gastroenterologist” and each of the localities. I noted how many of the results returned were within the city specified in my search and how many used “gastroenterologist” as their primary category. I even gave Google an advantage in this test by allowing entries that didn’t use gastroenterologist as their primary category but that did have some version of that word in their business title (making the specialty clearer to the user) to be included in Google’s wins column. Of the 150 total data points I checked, here is what I found:

42% of the content Google presented in local packs had no obvious connection to gastroenterology. It’s a shocking number, honestly. Imagine the number of wearying, irrelevant calls patients may be making seeking digestive health consultation if nearly half of the practices listed are not in this field of medicine.

A pattern I noticed in my small sample set is that larger cities had the most relevant results. Smaller towns and rural areas had much poorer relevance ratios. Meanwhile, Google is more accurate as to returning results within the query’s city, as shown by these numbers:

The trouble is, what looks like more of a win for Google here doesn’t actually chalk up as a win for searchers. In my data set, where Google was accurate in showing results from my specified city, the entities were often simply not GI doctors. There were instances in which all 3 results got the city right, but zero of the results got the specialty right. In fact, in one very bizarre case, Google showed me this:

Welders aside, it’s important to remember that our initial Angels Camp example demonstrated how the searcher, encountering a pack with filler listings in it and drilling down further into the Local Finder results for help may actually end up with even less relevance. Instead of two-out-of-three local pack entries being useless to them, they may end up with two-out-of-twenty unhelpful listings, with relevance consigned to obscurity.

And, of course, filler listings aren’t confined to medical categories. I engaged in this little survey because I’d noticed how often, in category after category, the user experience is less-than-ideal.

What should Google do to lessen the poor UX of irrelevant listings?

Remember that we’re not talking about spam here. That’s a completely different headache in Googleland. I saw no instances of spam in my data. The welder was not trying to pass himself off as a doctor. Rather, what we have here appears to be a case of Google weighting location keywords over goods/services keywords, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Google needs to develop logic that excludes extremely irrelevant listings for specific head terms to improve UX. How might this logic work?

1. Google could rely more on their own categories. Going back to our original example in which an eye care center is the #1 ranked result for “gastroenterologist angels camp”, we can use GMB Spy to check if any of the categories chosen by the business is “gastroenterologist”:

Google can, of course, see all the categories, and this lack of “gastroenterologist” among them should be a big “no” vote on showing the listing for our query.

2. Google could cross check the categories with the oft-disregarded business description:

Again, no mention of gastroenterological services there. Another “no” vote.

3. Google could run sentiment analysis on the reviews for an entity, checking to see if they contain the search phrase:

Lots of mentions of eye care here, but the body of reviews contains zero mentions of intestinal health. Another “no” vote.

4. Google could cross check the specified search phrases against all the knowledge they have from their crawls of the entity’s website:

This activity should confirm that there is no on-site reference to Dr. Haymond being anything other than an ophthalmologist . Then Google would need to make a calculation to downgrade the significance of the location (Angels Camp) based on internal logic that specifies that a user looking for a gastroenterologist in a city would prefer to see gastroenterologists a bit farther away than seeing eye doctors (or welders) nearby. So, this would be another “no” vote for inclusion as a result for our query.

5. Finally, Google could cross reference this crawl of the website against their wider crawl of the web:

This should act as a good, final confirmation that Dr. Haymond is an eye doctor rather than a gastroenterologist, even if he is in our desired city, and give us a fifth “no” vote for bringing his listing up in response to our query.

The web is vast, and so is Google’s job, but I believe the key to resolving this particular type of filler content is for Google to rely more on the knowledge they have of an entity’s vertical and less on their knowledge of its location. A diner may be willing to swap out tacos for pizza if there’s a Mexican restaurant a block away but no pizzerias in town, but in these YMYL categories, the same logic should not apply.

It’s not uncommon for Google to exclude local results from appearing at all when their existing logic tells them there isn’t a good answer. It’s tempting to say that solving the filler content problem depends on Google expanding the number of results for which they don’t show local listings. But, I don’t think this is a good solution, because the user then commonly sees irrelevant organic entries, instead of local ones. It seems to me that a better path is for Google to expand the radius of local SERPs for a greater number of queries so that a search like ours receives a map of the nearest gastroenterologists, with closer, superfluous businesses filtered out.

What should you do if a local business you’re promoting is getting lost amid filler listings?

SEO is going to be the short answer to this problem. It’s true that you can click the “send feedback” link at the bottom of the local finder, Google Maps or an organic SERP, and fill out form like this, with a screenshot:

However, my lone report of dissatisfaction with SERP quality is unlikely to get Google to change the results. Perhaps if they received multiple reports…

More practically-speaking, if a business you’re promoting is getting lost amid irrelevant listings, search engine optimization will be your strongest tool for convincing Google that you are, in fact, the better answer. In our study, we realized that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp, and that the nearest one is about fifteen miles away. If you were in charge of marketing this particular specialist, you could consider:

1. Gaining a foothold in nearby towns and cities

Recommend that the doctor develop real-world relationships with neighboring towns from which he would like to receive more clients. Perhaps, for example, he has hospital privileges, or participates in clinics or seminars in these other locales.

2. Writing about locality relationships

Publish content on the website highlighting these relationships and activities to begin associating the client’s name with a wider radius of localities.

3. Expanding the linktation radius

Seek relevant links and unstructured citations from the neighboring cities and towns, on the basis of these relationships and participation in a variety of community activities.

4. Customizing review requests based on customers’ addresses

If you know your customers well, consider wording review requests to prompt them to mention why it’s worth it to them to travel from X location for goods/services (nota bene: medical professionals, of course, need to be highly conversant with HIPPA compliance when it comes to online reputation management).

5. Filling out your listings to the max

Definitely do give Google and other local business listing platforms the maximum amount of information about the business you’re marketing (Moz Local can help!) . Fill out all the fields and give a try to functions like Google Posts, product listings, and Q&A.

6. Sowing your seeds beyond the walled garden

Pursue an active social media, video, industry, local news, print, radio, and television presence to the extent that your time and budget allows. Google’s walled garden, as defined by my friend, Dr. Pete, is not the only place to build your brand. And, if my other pal, Cyrus Shepard, is right, anti-trust litigation could even bring us to a day when Google’s own ramparts become less impermeable. In the meantime, work at being found beyond Google while you continue to grapple with visibility within their environment.

Study habits

It’s one thing for a student to fudge a book report, but squeaking by can become a negative lifelong habit if it isn’t caught early. I’m sure any Google staffer taking the time to actually read through the local packs in my survey would agree that they don’t rate an A+.

I’ve been in local SEO long enough to remember when Google first created their local index with filler content pulled together from other sources, without business owners having any idea they were even being represented online, and these early study habits seem to have stuck with the company when it comes to internal decision making that ends up having huge real-world impacts. The recent title tag tweak that is rewriting erroneous titles for vaccine landing pages is a concerning example of this lack of foresight and meticulousness.

If I could create a syllabus for Google’s local department, it would begin with separating out categories of the greatest significance to human health and safety and putting them through a rigorous, permanent manual review process to ensure that results are as accurate as possible, and as free from spam, scams, and useless filler content as the reviewers can make them. Google has basically got all of the money and talent in the world to put towards quality, and ethics would suggest they are obliged to make the investment.

Society deserves accurate search results delivered by studious providers, and rural and urban areas are worthy of equal quality commitments and a more nuanced approach than one-size-fits all. Too often, in Local, Google is flunking for want of respecting real-world realities. Let’s hope they start applying themselves to the fullest of their potential.

[thanhtuandoan89]

Google Local Filler Content Isn't Good UX, and Needs Revisions

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book?

I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps.

The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries:

Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need

Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete

Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX

Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about it.

What’s meant by “local filler” content and why is it such a problem?

The above screenshot captures the local pack results for a very specific search for a gastroenterologist in Angels Camp, California. In its effort to show me a pack, Google has scrambled together results that are two-thirds irrelevant to the full intent of my query, since I am not looking for either an eye care center or a pediatrician. The third result is better, even though Google had to travel about 15 miles from my specified search city to get it, because Dr. Eddi is, at least, a gastroenterologist.

It’s rather frustrating to see Google allowing the one accurate specialist to be outranked by two random local medical entities, perhaps simply because they are closer to home. It obviously won’t do to have an optometrist or children’s doctor consult with me on digestive health, and unfortunately, the situation becomes even odder when we click through to the local finder:

Of the twenty results Google has pulled together to make up the first page of the local finder, only two are actually gastroenterologists, lost in the weeds of podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, general MDs, and a few clinics with no clarity as to whether their presence in the results relates to having a digestive health specialists on staff . Zero of the listed gastroenterologists are in the town I’ve specified. The relevance ratio is quite poor for the user and shapes a daunting environment for appropriate practitioners who need to be found in all this mess.

You may have read me writing before about local SEO seeking to build the online mirror of real-world communities. That’s the ideal: ensuring that towns and cities have an excellent digital reference guide to the local resources available to them. Yet when I fact-checked with the real world (calling medical practices around this particular town), I found that there actually are no gastroenterologists in Angels Camp, even though Google’s results might make it look like there must be. What I heard from locals is that you must either take a 25 minute drive to Sonora to see a GI doctor, or head west for an hour and fifteen minutes to Modesto for appropriate care.

Google has yoked itself to AI, but the present state of search leaves it up to my human intelligence to realize that the SERPs are making empty promises, and that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp. This is what a neighbor, primary care doctor, or local business association would tell me if I was considering moving to this community and needed to be close to specialists. But Google tells me that there are more than 23 million organic choices relevant to my requirements, and scores of local business listings that so closely match my intent, they deserve pride of place in 3-packs, Finders and Maps.

The most material end result for the Google user is that they will likely experience unnecessary fatigue wasting time on the phone calling irrelevant doctors at a moment when they are in serious need of help from an appropriate professional. As a local SEO, I’m conditioned to look at local business categories and can weed out useless content almost automatically because of this, but is the average searcher noticing the truncated “eye care cent…” on the above listing? They’re almost certainly not using a Chrome extension like GMB Spy to see all the possible listing categories since Google decided to hide them years ago.

On a more philosophical note, my concern with local SERPs made up of irrelevant filler content is that they create a false picture of local bounty. As I recently mentioned to Marie Haynes:

The work of local businesses (and local SEOs!) derives its deepest meaning from providing and promoting essential local resources. Google’s inaccurate depiction of abundance could, even if in a small way, contribute to public apathy. The truth is that the US is facing a severe shortage of doctors, and anything that doesn’t reflect this reality could, potentially, undermine public action on issues like why our country, unlike the majority of nations, doesn’t make higher education free or affordable so that young people can become the medical professionals and other essential services providers we unquestionably need to be a functional society. Public well-being depends on complete accuracy in such matters.

As a local SEO, I want a truthful depiction of how well-resourced each community really is on the map, as a component of societal thought and decision-making. We’re all coping with public health and environmental emergencies now and know in our bones how vital essential local services have become.

Just how big is the problem of local filler content?

If the SERPs were more like humans, my query for “gastroenterologist Angels Camp” would return something like a featured snippet stating, “Sorry, our index indicates there are no GI Docs in Angels Camp. You’ll need to look in Sonora or Modesto for nearest options.” It definitely wouldn’t create the present scenario of, “Bad digestive system? See an eye doctor!” that’s being implied by the current results. I wanted to learn just how big this problem has become for Google.

I looked at the local packs in 25 towns and cities across California of widely varying populations using the search phrase “gastroenterologist” and each of the localities. I noted how many of the results returned were within the city specified in my search and how many used “gastroenterologist” as their primary category. I even gave Google an advantage in this test by allowing entries that didn’t use gastroenterologist as their primary category but that did have some version of that word in their business title (making the specialty clearer to the user) to be included in Google’s wins column. Of the 150 total data points I checked, here is what I found:

42% of the content Google presented in local packs had no obvious connection to gastroenterology. It’s a shocking number, honestly. Imagine the number of wearying, irrelevant calls patients may be making seeking digestive health consultation if nearly half of the practices listed are not in this field of medicine.

A pattern I noticed in my small sample set is that larger cities had the most relevant results. Smaller towns and rural areas had much poorer relevance ratios. Meanwhile, Google is more accurate as to returning results within the query’s city, as shown by these numbers:

The trouble is, what looks like more of a win for Google here doesn’t actually chalk up as a win for searchers. In my data set, where Google was accurate in showing results from my specified city, the entities were often simply not GI doctors. There were instances in which all 3 results got the city right, but zero of the results got the specialty right. In fact, in one very bizarre case, Google showed me this:

Welders aside, it’s important to remember that our initial Angels Camp example demonstrated how the searcher, encountering a pack with filler listings in it and drilling down further into the Local Finder results for help may actually end up with even less relevance. Instead of two-out-of-three local pack entries being useless to them, they may end up with two-out-of-twenty unhelpful listings, with relevance consigned to obscurity.

And, of course, filler listings aren’t confined to medical categories. I engaged in this little survey because I’d noticed how often, in category after category, the user experience is less-than-ideal.

What should Google do to lessen the poor UX of irrelevant listings?

Remember that we’re not talking about spam here. That’s a completely different headache in Googleland. I saw no instances of spam in my data. The welder was not trying to pass himself off as a doctor. Rather, what we have here appears to be a case of Google weighting location keywords over goods/services keywords, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Google needs to develop logic that excludes extremely irrelevant listings for specific head terms to improve UX. How might this logic work?

1. Google could rely more on their own categories. Going back to our original example in which an eye care center is the #1 ranked result for “gastroenterologist angels camp”, we can use GMB Spy to check if any of the categories chosen by the business is “gastroenterologist”:

Google can, of course, see all the categories, and this lack of “gastroenterologist” among them should be a big “no” vote on showing the listing for our query.

2. Google could cross check the categories with the oft-disregarded business description:

Again, no mention of gastroenterological services there. Another “no” vote.

3. Google could run sentiment analysis on the reviews for an entity, checking to see if they contain the search phrase:

Lots of mentions of eye care here, but the body of reviews contains zero mentions of intestinal health. Another “no” vote.

4. Google could cross check the specified search phrases against all the knowledge they have from their crawls of the entity’s website:

This activity should confirm that there is no on-site reference to Dr. Haymond being anything other than an ophthalmologist . Then Google would need to make a calculation to downgrade the significance of the location (Angels Camp) based on internal logic that specifies that a user looking for a gastroenterologist in a city would prefer to see gastroenterologists a bit farther away than seeing eye doctors (or welders) nearby. So, this would be another “no” vote for inclusion as a result for our query.

5. Finally, Google could cross reference this crawl of the website against their wider crawl of the web:

This should act as a good, final confirmation that Dr. Haymond is an eye doctor rather than a gastroenterologist, even if he is in our desired city, and give us a fifth “no” vote for bringing his listing up in response to our query.

The web is vast, and so is Google’s job, but I believe the key to resolving this particular type of filler content is for Google to rely more on the knowledge they have of an entity’s vertical and less on their knowledge of its location. A diner may be willing to swap out tacos for pizza if there’s a Mexican restaurant a block away but no pizzerias in town, but in these YMYL categories, the same logic should not apply.

It’s not uncommon for Google to exclude local results from appearing at all when their existing logic tells them there isn’t a good answer. It’s tempting to say that solving the filler content problem depends on Google expanding the number of results for which they don’t show local listings. But, I don’t think this is a good solution, because the user then commonly sees irrelevant organic entries, instead of local ones. It seems to me that a better path is for Google to expand the radius of local SERPs for a greater number of queries so that a search like ours receives a map of the nearest gastroenterologists, with closer, superfluous businesses filtered out.

What should you do if a local business you’re promoting is getting lost amid filler listings?

SEO is going to be the short answer to this problem. It’s true that you can click the “send feedback” link at the bottom of the local finder, Google Maps or an organic SERP, and fill out form like this, with a screenshot:

However, my lone report of dissatisfaction with SERP quality is unlikely to get Google to change the results. Perhaps if they received multiple reports…

More practically-speaking, if a business you’re promoting is getting lost amid irrelevant listings, search engine optimization will be your strongest tool for convincing Google that you are, in fact, the better answer. In our study, we realized that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp, and that the nearest one is about fifteen miles away. If you were in charge of marketing this particular specialist, you could consider:

1. Gaining a foothold in nearby towns and cities

Recommend that the doctor develop real-world relationships with neighboring towns from which he would like to receive more clients. Perhaps, for example, he has hospital privileges, or participates in clinics or seminars in these other locales.

2. Writing about locality relationships

Publish content on the website highlighting these relationships and activities to begin associating the client’s name with a wider radius of localities.

3. Expanding the linktation radius

Seek relevant links and unstructured citations from the neighboring cities and towns, on the basis of these relationships and participation in a variety of community activities.

4. Customizing review requests based on customers’ addresses

If you know your customers well, consider wording review requests to prompt them to mention why it’s worth it to them to travel from X location for goods/services (nota bene: medical professionals, of course, need to be highly conversant with HIPPA compliance when it comes to online reputation management).

5. Filling out your listings to the max

Definitely do give Google and other local business listing platforms the maximum amount of information about the business you’re marketing (Moz Local can help!) . Fill out all the fields and give a try to functions like Google Posts, product listings, and Q&A.

6. Sowing your seeds beyond the walled garden

Pursue an active social media, video, industry, local news, print, radio, and television presence to the extent that your time and budget allows. Google’s walled garden, as defined by my friend, Dr. Pete, is not the only place to build your brand. And, if my other pal, Cyrus Shepard, is right, anti-trust litigation could even bring us to a day when Google’s own ramparts become less impermeable. In the meantime, work at being found beyond Google while you continue to grapple with visibility within their environment.

Study habits

It’s one thing for a student to fudge a book report, but squeaking by can become a negative lifelong habit if it isn’t caught early. I’m sure any Google staffer taking the time to actually read through the local packs in my survey would agree that they don’t rate an A+.

I’ve been in local SEO long enough to remember when Google first created their local index with filler content pulled together from other sources, without business owners having any idea they were even being represented online, and these early study habits seem to have stuck with the company when it comes to internal decision making that ends up having huge real-world impacts. The recent title tag tweak that is rewriting erroneous titles for vaccine landing pages is a concerning example of this lack of foresight and meticulousness.

If I could create a syllabus for Google’s local department, it would begin with separating out categories of the greatest significance to human health and safety and putting them through a rigorous, permanent manual review process to ensure that results are as accurate as possible, and as free from spam, scams, and useless filler content as the reviewers can make them. Google has basically got all of the money and talent in the world to put towards quality, and ethics would suggest they are obliged to make the investment.

Society deserves accurate search results delivered by studious providers, and rural and urban areas are worthy of equal quality commitments and a more nuanced approach than one-size-fits all. Too often, in Local, Google is flunking for want of respecting real-world realities. Let’s hope they start applying themselves to the fullest of their potential.

[drummcarpentry]

Google Local Filler Content Isn't Good UX, and Needs Revisions

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book?

I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps.

The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries:

Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need

Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete

Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX

Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about it.

What’s meant by “local filler” content and why is it such a problem?

The above screenshot captures the local pack results for a very specific search for a gastroenterologist in Angels Camp, California. In its effort to show me a pack, Google has scrambled together results that are two-thirds irrelevant to the full intent of my query, since I am not looking for either an eye care center or a pediatrician. The third result is better, even though Google had to travel about 15 miles from my specified search city to get it, because Dr. Eddi is, at least, a gastroenterologist.

It’s rather frustrating to see Google allowing the one accurate specialist to be outranked by two random local medical entities, perhaps simply because they are closer to home. It obviously won’t do to have an optometrist or children’s doctor consult with me on digestive health, and unfortunately, the situation becomes even odder when we click through to the local finder:

Of the twenty results Google has pulled together to make up the first page of the local finder, only two are actually gastroenterologists, lost in the weeds of podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, general MDs, and a few clinics with no clarity as to whether their presence in the results relates to having a digestive health specialists on staff . Zero of the listed gastroenterologists are in the town I’ve specified. The relevance ratio is quite poor for the user and shapes a daunting environment for appropriate practitioners who need to be found in all this mess.

You may have read me writing before about local SEO seeking to build the online mirror of real-world communities. That’s the ideal: ensuring that towns and cities have an excellent digital reference guide to the local resources available to them. Yet when I fact-checked with the real world (calling medical practices around this particular town), I found that there actually are no gastroenterologists in Angels Camp, even though Google’s results might make it look like there must be. What I heard from locals is that you must either take a 25 minute drive to Sonora to see a GI doctor, or head west for an hour and fifteen minutes to Modesto for appropriate care.

Google has yoked itself to AI, but the present state of search leaves it up to my human intelligence to realize that the SERPs are making empty promises, and that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp. This is what a neighbor, primary care doctor, or local business association would tell me if I was considering moving to this community and needed to be close to specialists. But Google tells me that there are more than 23 million organic choices relevant to my requirements, and scores of local business listings that so closely match my intent, they deserve pride of place in 3-packs, Finders and Maps.

The most material end result for the Google user is that they will likely experience unnecessary fatigue wasting time on the phone calling irrelevant doctors at a moment when they are in serious need of help from an appropriate professional. As a local SEO, I’m conditioned to look at local business categories and can weed out useless content almost automatically because of this, but is the average searcher noticing the truncated “eye care cent…” on the above listing? They’re almost certainly not using a Chrome extension like GMB Spy to see all the possible listing categories since Google decided to hide them years ago.

On a more philosophical note, my concern with local SERPs made up of irrelevant filler content is that they create a false picture of local bounty. As I recently mentioned to Marie Haynes:

The work of local businesses (and local SEOs!) derives its deepest meaning from providing and promoting essential local resources. Google’s inaccurate depiction of abundance could, even if in a small way, contribute to public apathy. The truth is that the US is facing a severe shortage of doctors, and anything that doesn’t reflect this reality could, potentially, undermine public action on issues like why our country, unlike the majority of nations, doesn’t make higher education free or affordable so that young people can become the medical professionals and other essential services providers we unquestionably need to be a functional society. Public well-being depends on complete accuracy in such matters.

As a local SEO, I want a truthful depiction of how well-resourced each community really is on the map, as a component of societal thought and decision-making. We’re all coping with public health and environmental emergencies now and know in our bones how vital essential local services have become.

Just how big is the problem of local filler content?

If the SERPs were more like humans, my query for “gastroenterologist Angels Camp” would return something like a featured snippet stating, “Sorry, our index indicates there are no GI Docs in Angels Camp. You’ll need to look in Sonora or Modesto for nearest options.” It definitely wouldn’t create the present scenario of, “Bad digestive system? See an eye doctor!” that’s being implied by the current results. I wanted to learn just how big this problem has become for Google.

I looked at the local packs in 25 towns and cities across California of widely varying populations using the search phrase “gastroenterologist” and each of the localities. I noted how many of the results returned were within the city specified in my search and how many used “gastroenterologist” as their primary category. I even gave Google an advantage in this test by allowing entries that didn’t use gastroenterologist as their primary category but that did have some version of that word in their business title (making the specialty clearer to the user) to be included in Google’s wins column. Of the 150 total data points I checked, here is what I found:

42% of the content Google presented in local packs had no obvious connection to gastroenterology. It’s a shocking number, honestly. Imagine the number of wearying, irrelevant calls patients may be making seeking digestive health consultation if nearly half of the practices listed are not in this field of medicine.

A pattern I noticed in my small sample set is that larger cities had the most relevant results. Smaller towns and rural areas had much poorer relevance ratios. Meanwhile, Google is more accurate as to returning results within the query’s city, as shown by these numbers:

The trouble is, what looks like more of a win for Google here doesn’t actually chalk up as a win for searchers. In my data set, where Google was accurate in showing results from my specified city, the entities were often simply not GI doctors. There were instances in which all 3 results got the city right, but zero of the results got the specialty right. In fact, in one very bizarre case, Google showed me this:

Welders aside, it’s important to remember that our initial Angels Camp example demonstrated how the searcher, encountering a pack with filler listings in it and drilling down further into the Local Finder results for help may actually end up with even less relevance. Instead of two-out-of-three local pack entries being useless to them, they may end up with two-out-of-twenty unhelpful listings, with relevance consigned to obscurity.

And, of course, filler listings aren’t confined to medical categories. I engaged in this little survey because I’d noticed how often, in category after category, the user experience is less-than-ideal.

What should Google do to lessen the poor UX of irrelevant listings?

Remember that we’re not talking about spam here. That’s a completely different headache in Googleland. I saw no instances of spam in my data. The welder was not trying to pass himself off as a doctor. Rather, what we have here appears to be a case of Google weighting location keywords over goods/services keywords, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Google needs to develop logic that excludes extremely irrelevant listings for specific head terms to improve UX. How might this logic work?

1. Google could rely more on their own categories. Going back to our original example in which an eye care center is the #1 ranked result for “gastroenterologist angels camp”, we can use GMB Spy to check if any of the categories chosen by the business is “gastroenterologist”:

Google can, of course, see all the categories, and this lack of “gastroenterologist” among them should be a big “no” vote on showing the listing for our query.

2. Google could cross check the categories with the oft-disregarded business description:

Again, no mention of gastroenterological services there. Another “no” vote.

3. Google could run sentiment analysis on the reviews for an entity, checking to see if they contain the search phrase:

Lots of mentions of eye care here, but the body of reviews contains zero mentions of intestinal health. Another “no” vote.

4. Google could cross check the specified search phrases against all the knowledge they have from their crawls of the entity’s website:

This activity should confirm that there is no on-site reference to Dr. Haymond being anything other than an ophthalmologist . Then Google would need to make a calculation to downgrade the significance of the location (Angels Camp) based on internal logic that specifies that a user looking for a gastroenterologist in a city would prefer to see gastroenterologists a bit farther away than seeing eye doctors (or welders) nearby. So, this would be another “no” vote for inclusion as a result for our query.

5. Finally, Google could cross reference this crawl of the website against their wider crawl of the web:

This should act as a good, final confirmation that Dr. Haymond is an eye doctor rather than a gastroenterologist, even if he is in our desired city, and give us a fifth “no” vote for bringing his listing up in response to our query.

The web is vast, and so is Google’s job, but I believe the key to resolving this particular type of filler content is for Google to rely more on the knowledge they have of an entity’s vertical and less on their knowledge of its location. A diner may be willing to swap out tacos for pizza if there’s a Mexican restaurant a block away but no pizzerias in town, but in these YMYL categories, the same logic should not apply.

It’s not uncommon for Google to exclude local results from appearing at all when their existing logic tells them there isn’t a good answer. It’s tempting to say that solving the filler content problem depends on Google expanding the number of results for which they don’t show local listings. But, I don’t think this is a good solution, because the user then commonly sees irrelevant organic entries, instead of local ones. It seems to me that a better path is for Google to expand the radius of local SERPs for a greater number of queries so that a search like ours receives a map of the nearest gastroenterologists, with closer, superfluous businesses filtered out.

What should you do if a local business you’re promoting is getting lost amid filler listings?

SEO is going to be the short answer to this problem. It’s true that you can click the “send feedback” link at the bottom of the local finder, Google Maps or an organic SERP, and fill out form like this, with a screenshot:

However, my lone report of dissatisfaction with SERP quality is unlikely to get Google to change the results. Perhaps if they received multiple reports…

More practically-speaking, if a business you’re promoting is getting lost amid irrelevant listings, search engine optimization will be your strongest tool for convincing Google that you are, in fact, the better answer. In our study, we realized that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp, and that the nearest one is about fifteen miles away. If you were in charge of marketing this particular specialist, you could consider:

1. Gaining a foothold in nearby towns and cities

Recommend that the doctor develop real-world relationships with neighboring towns from which he would like to receive more clients. Perhaps, for example, he has hospital privileges, or participates in clinics or seminars in these other locales.

2. Writing about locality relationships

Publish content on the website highlighting these relationships and activities to begin associating the client’s name with a wider radius of localities.

3. Expanding the linktation radius

Seek relevant links and unstructured citations from the neighboring cities and towns, on the basis of these relationships and participation in a variety of community activities.

4. Customizing review requests based on customers’ addresses

If you know your customers well, consider wording review requests to prompt them to mention why it’s worth it to them to travel from X location for goods/services (nota bene: medical professionals, of course, need to be highly conversant with HIPPA compliance when it comes to online reputation management).

5. Filling out your listings to the max

Definitely do give Google and other local business listing platforms the maximum amount of information about the business you’re marketing (Moz Local can help!) . Fill out all the fields and give a try to functions like Google Posts, product listings, and Q&A.

6. Sowing your seeds beyond the walled garden

Pursue an active social media, video, industry, local news, print, radio, and television presence to the extent that your time and budget allows. Google’s walled garden, as defined by my friend, Dr. Pete, is not the only place to build your brand. And, if my other pal, Cyrus Shepard, is right, anti-trust litigation could even bring us to a day when Google’s own ramparts become less impermeable. In the meantime, work at being found beyond Google while you continue to grapple with visibility within their environment.

Study habits

It’s one thing for a student to fudge a book report, but squeaking by can become a negative lifelong habit if it isn’t caught early. I’m sure any Google staffer taking the time to actually read through the local packs in my survey would agree that they don’t rate an A+.

I’ve been in local SEO long enough to remember when Google first created their local index with filler content pulled together from other sources, without business owners having any idea they were even being represented online, and these early study habits seem to have stuck with the company when it comes to internal decision making that ends up having huge real-world impacts. The recent title tag tweak that is rewriting erroneous titles for vaccine landing pages is a concerning example of this lack of foresight and meticulousness.

If I could create a syllabus for Google’s local department, it would begin with separating out categories of the greatest significance to human health and safety and putting them through a rigorous, permanent manual review process to ensure that results are as accurate as possible, and as free from spam, scams, and useless filler content as the reviewers can make them. Google has basically got all of the money and talent in the world to put towards quality, and ethics would suggest they are obliged to make the investment.

Society deserves accurate search results delivered by studious providers, and rural and urban areas are worthy of equal quality commitments and a more nuanced approach than one-size-fits all. Too often, in Local, Google is flunking for want of respecting real-world realities. Let’s hope they start applying themselves to the fullest of their potential.

[lakelandseo]

Google Local Filler Content Isn't Good UX, and Needs Revisions

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book?

I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps.

The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries:

Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need

Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete

Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX

Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about it.

What’s meant by “local filler” content and why is it such a problem?

The above screenshot captures the local pack results for a very specific search for a gastroenterologist in Angels Camp, California. In its effort to show me a pack, Google has scrambled together results that are two-thirds irrelevant to the full intent of my query, since I am not looking for either an eye care center or a pediatrician. The third result is better, even though Google had to travel about 15 miles from my specified search city to get it, because Dr. Eddi is, at least, a gastroenterologist.

It’s rather frustrating to see Google allowing the one accurate specialist to be outranked by two random local medical entities, perhaps simply because they are closer to home. It obviously won’t do to have an optometrist or children’s doctor consult with me on digestive health, and unfortunately, the situation becomes even odder when we click through to the local finder:

Of the twenty results Google has pulled together to make up the first page of the local finder, only two are actually gastroenterologists, lost in the weeds of podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, general MDs, and a few clinics with no clarity as to whether their presence in the results relates to having a digestive health specialists on staff . Zero of the listed gastroenterologists are in the town I’ve specified. The relevance ratio is quite poor for the user and shapes a daunting environment for appropriate practitioners who need to be found in all this mess.

You may have read me writing before about local SEO seeking to build the online mirror of real-world communities. That’s the ideal: ensuring that towns and cities have an excellent digital reference guide to the local resources available to them. Yet when I fact-checked with the real world (calling medical practices around this particular town), I found that there actually are no gastroenterologists in Angels Camp, even though Google’s results might make it look like there must be. What I heard from locals is that you must either take a 25 minute drive to Sonora to see a GI doctor, or head west for an hour and fifteen minutes to Modesto for appropriate care.

Google has yoked itself to AI, but the present state of search leaves it up to my human intelligence to realize that the SERPs are making empty promises, and that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp. This is what a neighbor, primary care doctor, or local business association would tell me if I was considering moving to this community and needed to be close to specialists. But Google tells me that there are more than 23 million organic choices relevant to my requirements, and scores of local business listings that so closely match my intent, they deserve pride of place in 3-packs, Finders and Maps.

The most material end result for the Google user is that they will likely experience unnecessary fatigue wasting time on the phone calling irrelevant doctors at a moment when they are in serious need of help from an appropriate professional. As a local SEO, I’m conditioned to look at local business categories and can weed out useless content almost automatically because of this, but is the average searcher noticing the truncated “eye care cent…” on the above listing? They’re almost certainly not using a Chrome extension like GMB Spy to see all the possible listing categories since Google decided to hide them years ago.

On a more philosophical note, my concern with local SERPs made up of irrelevant filler content is that they create a false picture of local bounty. As I recently mentioned to Marie Haynes:

The work of local businesses (and local SEOs!) derives its deepest meaning from providing and promoting essential local resources. Google’s inaccurate depiction of abundance could, even if in a small way, contribute to public apathy. The truth is that the US is facing a severe shortage of doctors, and anything that doesn’t reflect this reality could, potentially, undermine public action on issues like why our country, unlike the majority of nations, doesn’t make higher education free or affordable so that young people can become the medical professionals and other essential services providers we unquestionably need to be a functional society. Public well-being depends on complete accuracy in such matters.

As a local SEO, I want a truthful depiction of how well-resourced each community really is on the map, as a component of societal thought and decision-making. We’re all coping with public health and environmental emergencies now and know in our bones how vital essential local services have become.

Just how big is the problem of local filler content?

If the SERPs were more like humans, my query for “gastroenterologist Angels Camp” would return something like a featured snippet stating, “Sorry, our index indicates there are no GI Docs in Angels Camp. You’ll need to look in Sonora or Modesto for nearest options.” It definitely wouldn’t create the present scenario of, “Bad digestive system? See an eye doctor!” that’s being implied by the current results. I wanted to learn just how big this problem has become for Google.

I looked at the local packs in 25 towns and cities across California of widely varying populations using the search phrase “gastroenterologist” and each of the localities. I noted how many of the results returned were within the city specified in my search and how many used “gastroenterologist” as their primary category. I even gave Google an advantage in this test by allowing entries that didn’t use gastroenterologist as their primary category but that did have some version of that word in their business title (making the specialty clearer to the user) to be included in Google’s wins column. Of the 150 total data points I checked, here is what I found:

42% of the content Google presented in local packs had no obvious connection to gastroenterology. It’s a shocking number, honestly. Imagine the number of wearying, irrelevant calls patients may be making seeking digestive health consultation if nearly half of the practices listed are not in this field of medicine.

A pattern I noticed in my small sample set is that larger cities had the most relevant results. Smaller towns and rural areas had much poorer relevance ratios. Meanwhile, Google is more accurate as to returning results within the query’s city, as shown by these numbers:

The trouble is, what looks like more of a win for Google here doesn’t actually chalk up as a win for searchers. In my data set, where Google was accurate in showing results from my specified city, the entities were often simply not GI doctors. There were instances in which all 3 results got the city right, but zero of the results got the specialty right. In fact, in one very bizarre case, Google showed me this:

Welders aside, it’s important to remember that our initial Angels Camp example demonstrated how the searcher, encountering a pack with filler listings in it and drilling down further into the Local Finder results for help may actually end up with even less relevance. Instead of two-out-of-three local pack entries being useless to them, they may end up with two-out-of-twenty unhelpful listings, with relevance consigned to obscurity.

And, of course, filler listings aren’t confined to medical categories. I engaged in this little survey because I’d noticed how often, in category after category, the user experience is less-than-ideal.

What should Google do to lessen the poor UX of irrelevant listings?

Remember that we’re not talking about spam here. That’s a completely different headache in Googleland. I saw no instances of spam in my data. The welder was not trying to pass himself off as a doctor. Rather, what we have here appears to be a case of Google weighting location keywords over goods/services keywords, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Google needs to develop logic that excludes extremely irrelevant listings for specific head terms to improve UX. How might this logic work?

1. Google could rely more on their own categories. Going back to our original example in which an eye care center is the #1 ranked result for “gastroenterologist angels camp”, we can use GMB Spy to check if any of the categories chosen by the business is “gastroenterologist”:

Google can, of course, see all the categories, and this lack of “gastroenterologist” among them should be a big “no” vote on showing the listing for our query.

2. Google could cross check the categories with the oft-disregarded business description:

Again, no mention of gastroenterological services there. Another “no” vote.

3. Google could run sentiment analysis on the reviews for an entity, checking to see if they contain the search phrase:

Lots of mentions of eye care here, but the body of reviews contains zero mentions of intestinal health. Another “no” vote.

4. Google could cross check the specified search phrases against all the knowledge they have from their crawls of the entity’s website:

This activity should confirm that there is no on-site reference to Dr. Haymond being anything other than an ophthalmologist . Then Google would need to make a calculation to downgrade the significance of the location (Angels Camp) based on internal logic that specifies that a user looking for a gastroenterologist in a city would prefer to see gastroenterologists a bit farther away than seeing eye doctors (or welders) nearby. So, this would be another “no” vote for inclusion as a result for our query.

5. Finally, Google could cross reference this crawl of the website against their wider crawl of the web:

This should act as a good, final confirmation that Dr. Haymond is an eye doctor rather than a gastroenterologist, even if he is in our desired city, and give us a fifth “no” vote for bringing his listing up in response to our query.

The web is vast, and so is Google’s job, but I believe the key to resolving this particular type of filler content is for Google to rely more on the knowledge they have of an entity’s vertical and less on their knowledge of its location. A diner may be willing to swap out tacos for pizza if there’s a Mexican restaurant a block away but no pizzerias in town, but in these YMYL categories, the same logic should not apply.

It’s not uncommon for Google to exclude local results from appearing at all when their existing logic tells them there isn’t a good answer. It’s tempting to say that solving the filler content problem depends on Google expanding the number of results for which they don’t show local listings. But, I don’t think this is a good solution, because the user then commonly sees irrelevant organic entries, instead of local ones. It seems to me that a better path is for Google to expand the radius of local SERPs for a greater number of queries so that a search like ours receives a map of the nearest gastroenterologists, with closer, superfluous businesses filtered out.

What should you do if a local business you’re promoting is getting lost amid filler listings?

SEO is going to be the short answer to this problem. It’s true that you can click the “send feedback” link at the bottom of the local finder, Google Maps or an organic SERP, and fill out form like this, with a screenshot:

However, my lone report of dissatisfaction with SERP quality is unlikely to get Google to change the results. Perhaps if they received multiple reports…

More practically-speaking, if a business you’re promoting is getting lost amid irrelevant listings, search engine optimization will be your strongest tool for convincing Google that you are, in fact, the better answer. In our study, we realized that there are, in fact, no GI docs in Angels Camp, and that the nearest one is about fifteen miles away. If you were in charge of marketing this particular specialist, you could consider:

1. Gaining a foothold in nearby towns and cities

Recommend that the doctor develop real-world relationships with neighboring towns from which he would like to receive more clients. Perhaps, for example, he has hospital privileges, or participates in clinics or seminars in these other locales.

2. Writing about locality relationships

Publish content on the website highlighting these relationships and activities to begin associating the client’s name with a wider radius of localities.

3. Expanding the linktation radius

Seek relevant links and unstructured citations from the neighboring cities and towns, on the basis of these relationships and participation in a variety of community activities.

4. Customizing review requests based on customers’ addresses

If you know your customers well, consider wording review requests to prompt them to mention why it’s worth it to them to travel from X location for goods/services (nota bene: medical professionals, of course, need to be highly conversant with HIPPA compliance when it comes to online reputation management).

5. Filling out your listings to the max

Definitely do give Google and other local business listing platforms the maximum amount of information about the business you’re marketing (Moz Local can help!) . Fill out all the fields and give a try to functions like Google Posts, product listings, and Q&A.

6. Sowing your seeds beyond the walled garden

Pursue an active social media, video, industry, local news, print, radio, and television presence to the extent that your time and budget allows. Google’s walled garden, as defined by my friend, Dr. Pete, is not the only place to build your brand. And, if my other pal, Cyrus Shepard, is right, anti-trust litigation could even bring us to a day when Google’s own ramparts become less impermeable. In the meantime, work at being found beyond Google while you continue to grapple with visibility within their environment.

Study habits

It’s one thing for a student to fudge a book report, but squeaking by can become a negative lifelong habit if it isn’t caught early. I’m sure any Google staffer taking the time to actually read through the local packs in my survey would agree that they don’t rate an A+.

I’ve been in local SEO long enough to remember when Google first created their local index with filler content pulled together from other sources, without business owners having any idea they were even being represented online, and these early study habits seem to have stuck with the company when it comes to internal decision making that ends up having huge real-world impacts. The recent title tag tweak that is rewriting erroneous titles for vaccine landing pages is a concerning example of this lack of foresight and meticulousness.

If I could create a syllabus for Google’s local department, it would begin with separating out categories of the greatest significance to human health and safety and putting them through a rigorous, permanent manual review process to ensure that results are as accurate as possible, and as free from spam, scams, and useless filler content as the reviewers can make them. Google has basically got all of the money and talent in the world to put towards quality, and ethics would suggest they are obliged to make the investment.

Society deserves accurate search results delivered by studious providers, and rural and urban areas are worthy of equal quality commitments and a more nuanced approach than one-size-fits all. Too often, in Local, Google is flunking for want of respecting real-world realities. Let’s hope they start applying themselves to the fullest of their potential.