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I find this interesting. I didn't think of Google local listing as not organic but I did the search in the article[1] and sure enough it takes a lot of the real estate. Perhaps, Google could publish a standard way to write your own self-hosted Places page? We will still have questions on how the ranking will work and whether Google will prioritize its own Google+ place pages over self-hosted place pages but I think this would be a start. What do you think?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/Bf74Dd7.png



Well, thereby hangs a tale. But the short answer is that, by and large, Google seems to be aggressively uninterested in scraping that kind of structured/semantic data from the public Web. In fact it even seems to have been active in trying to prevent that kind of data from finding its way into webpages at all: remember the arcane but nasty scrap about metadata in HTML5? Well, this is what that was all about.


Scraping/doing it semantically has copyright implications (Re: Europe) so realistically the Google-owned approach is the most viable one.


Does Europe think that the robots.txt approach is cumbersome for "content" owners? If someone doesn't want anyone to crawl, they'd put something like

User-agent: * Disallow: /





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