Google Drops Local Carousel for Hotels, Restaurants & Other Local Listings
This is a good move by Google, I’ve never been a big fan of carousels, they take up too much real estate and obscure too much of the page. Here in the Midwest I’m still getting the dark carousel header however so the tests aren’t here yet.
If you do the same search under images you will also get a cleaner and interesting “sub category carousel” which you might want to take a look at if the regular carousel annoys you too much.
Update: if you sign out of Google+ you will probably get the non carousel view, that’s what happens when I do.
Google is dropping its horizontal Carousel display of local search results in several categories: restaurants, nightlife, entertainment and hotels. It’s being replaced by a 3-pack of organic listings and some new secondary pages.
The Local Carousel rolled out in June, 2013 for the PC in the US and gradually expanded to a number of categories beyond local results (e.g., US Presidents). It’s not clear whether it will remain for these non-local search results.
Since day one the Carousel has been controversial among local SEOs and even among those involved in the European antitrust negotiations with Google (it has not launched in Europe).
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