At the Deconstructing Pigeon Panel at SMX, David Mihm, Adam Dorfman and I shared a lot of dataabout the algorithm and how it had affected the local search engine results pages (SERPs). One thing we didn’t really discuss was why big multi-location brands may have been dinged.

Over the past few months, we have received reports that some big brands have lost 5-10% of their organic traffic post-Pigeon.

As we discussed during the panel, Google had told Search Engine Land that Pigeon focused on the following :

But perhaps the real insight discussed by the distinguished panelists was that Google had perhaps overdone it on its “brand” algorithm and it now was incorrectly interpreting a lot of queries as “brand” queries which was leading to a lot of spam.