Is Google Places ranking tie to website ranking?

Hi Ken,

The difference between and "pack" and "blended" algo used to be VERY obvious. Now it's hard to tell and there is only about a 1 pixel difference in the display but here is the telltale sign. If it's the old PACK style algo (in which ranking order is controlled by citations and Place page factors) there is a link above the pack that says "More Places about keyword in City."

If it's the blended algo (controlled 95% by organic ranking factors) then that link is missing.

G used to show the meta description so then it was obvious because the listings were several lines high, but now with no description it's hard.

Plus if you guys don't read my blog, I just announced a couple new algos and Google is OVERWRITING Title tags like crazy. So blended listings also used to be more obvious because the top 3 would show web site title tags. But now she's starting to replace with the biz name, keywords or something scraped from the site OR even from other sites. She's basically just putting whatever she wants there.

The blended algo shows about 70% of the time now and primarily for the core keywords.

"By organic site factors, do you mean how high the site is ranked?"

Yes BUT its hard to tell pure organic rankings any more for a number of reasons. Mainly they are just really obscured by the blended results and it's harder to tell at a glance WHY someone is ranking. (Is it due to citations, or on-site SEO?)

I have a FREE tool on my tools page in sig below where you can see the PURE organic ranking minus local. It's really helpful to see the PURE ORGANIC strength of a site if you strip out all the local factors.

PLUS if you use that tool for a keyword that pulls blended and compare with the blended results you can see DIRECT correlation in the search order, which proves that it's organic that's in control. (But take into account some listings will be missing in "blended" due to mismatched NAP, dupes, proximity lockout or Places violations.)