The first week of January, we reported on an interesting local update we named the January 2025 local search update. Well, this might be more of a diversity update, where Google removes the URL for the core organic results, when that URL is also present in the local pack results. Update, I am told this was unrelated to the January update (which makes sense) and this started as early as last August.
In short, if you already are ranking that URL in the local pack, then Google may remove that URL from ranking on the first page of the organic core web results. So if your home page is ranking on the first page of the web search results and then you also show up in the local pack results, Google may remove your organic result from the search results page.
Joy Hawkins is calling this the diversity update – and while Google has not confirmed this, she believes this is what is happening. In fact, we did have this happen in 2019 with featured snippets and core results not showing the same URL all the time.
Here is Joy’s YouTubey video on this:
I tested it with my local listings and like Joy said, it does not work 100% of the time:
But I mean, she said she tested this on tons of clients.
Joy said to fix this, just change the URL you have in your Google Business Profile to a different page on your site.
Have you noticed this, where if you are ranking a URL in the local pack, that URL then goes missing from the main web results below the local pack?
This particular update started before January. We tracked it back to likely originating around August 2024.
— Colan Nielsen (@ColanNielsen) February 19, 2025
Forum discussion at Local Search Forum.
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