Shake up for Brick and Mortar businesses?

Yes Google regularly does this reshuffling.

I think the most important lesson you'll ever learn about search engine optimization is to give the search engines what they want and the people using the search engines what they want on the pages on your site.

That usually means giving them high quality, highly targeted content.

Obviously you're going to need other sites pointing at your site and have other factors to rank high for competitive terms but in many cases the long tail keywords you optimize for for local businesses are not very competitive.

Some aren't competitive at all.

That's one reason you'll see these schemes to get number one rankings with one dodgy method or another.

If you're the guy supplying highly targeted, high quality content you never have to worry much about Google reshuffles and Google slaps.

And you can maintain top rankings with little or no work for year after year.

I just checked one term I optimized for in late 2004.

Now 11,100,000 results on Google for that search term.

I haven't done any kind of work to keep that site at the top since late 2004 and I'm still number one and number two on google in April 2009.

Giving the search engines what they want works.

Also still ranking well on Yahoo with numbers
1,4,5,7 and 10.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh