On March 23rd - Google Local Search Update 'Corrects' Vicinity Update

There was a recent observation on March 22nd and 23rd, about the bright local monitoring software spiking up a bit, which ended up in storing some tabs that we could have had a Google native search-replace. Still, joy Hawkins posted within the local search forums that this replaces to have been right of the vicinity update that was the native return people reported in December 2021, which was confirmed by Google later on.

Joy even wrote that he is pleased to say that they see some corrections to a number of the overkill that the vicinity update had on companies with keyboard-rich enterprise names. They had seen patterns earlier than the companies with the keyword-rich enterprise names have been filtered out if several companies in the market had comparable names. It appears reversed.

She also said that this charge displays the earlier than and after for the native pack rankings, and the first one exhibits the enormous influence on express key phrases that embody a city name.

December 8th 2021, was the first time the term vicinity update was heard. One of the forum users asked about some significant differences they were seeing in the local pack results. The thread seamlessy started getting several replies that were noticing the same patterns. Google confirmed that it was an algorithm update that began back in November.

Around December 6th, several changes were seen as people started posting before and after screenshots of the search engine rankings analysing ranking for the clients and the competitors. The update was quite significant in 2019, which later turned out to be a bug, so that hasn't been anything this dramatic in the local search world now.

The basics about the vicinity

Vicinity is defined as the space near or surrounding a specific place, and the update in my findings was mainly about proximity. It has increased the proximity factor, but over the past five years, we have seen several businesses in competitive markets be able to avoid the proximity element and rank quite far away from their office. So it does not appear to be the case anymore.

The update corresponds with the Google changing the map's layout as the new map is square instead of rectangular, and shrinking the map size can have made it so that the viewpoint Google is looking at the area could have changed.

The update is not new but around for years now!