As per Search Engine Round Table, Google confirmed that the Local search ranking algorithm now uses if a location is open as part of its local ranking system. This makes sense – if it’s the morning and you’re looking for a place to go to breakfast, you want to see places that are open as opposed to those that are closed.
But what if it’s night time and you’re looking for a breakfast place to go to in the morning? You want to be able to view all the places that aren’t currently open.
This is all part of Google to provide users with what they’re looking for.
But as Sherry Bonelli astutely observed, every brand with a desire to appear in search all the time, will simply change their hours to 24/7 which doesn’t help someone who wants to go there when they aren’t in fact open.
You can’t blame Google for wanting the results to be dynamic but to their credit, they’ve admitted that this will need to be tweaked.
How exactly they do that remains to be seen.
Caption: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_maps_car,_Paris_May_2014.jpg
