Google Maps display pulls in additional links

Miriam at the SEO Igloo blog made an interesting discovery this week: On some search queries, Google Maps will pull in related links beneath each listing.

As you’ll see & read at SEO Igloo, the additional links are appearing on a county-level search. Each listing includes an extra informational link, along with a generous snippet of info. from the extra link.

I was able to reproduce this display on searches such as [web design king county] but not [web design seattle] … and on [thrift stores dallas county] but not [thrift stores dallas]. So it appears to come up on queries that are at least county-level.

In chatting about this a couple days ago with Mike B., he mentioned seeing another different Maps display on even wider geographic queries, like [search optimization western new york].

This is the first time I’ve ever seen either type of display, though I can’t claim to do many county-level or wider geographic searches. Interesting, nonetheless, because it’s more evidence of how unique the Google Local Search Algorithm has to be, in order to account for the wide variety of ways a searcher might look for geographic data.