Have you looked at any of the Google City Pages lately?

URLS Have Changed

URLs that used to be http://www.google.com/portland and http://www.google.com/austin/ are now http://www.google.com/city/portland and http://www.google.com/city/austin.

There is now a “home page” for the City Pages at http://www.google.com/city/

Google seems to be setting things up to create pages like http://www.google.com/restaurants/portland and http://www.google.com/hotels/austin OR http://www.google.com/city/portland/restaurants and  http://www.google.com/city/austin/hotels, which comes as no surprise. I expect any new pages for the cities to closely follow the categories you can now choose from on the City Pages:

As those categories expand to  things like professional services, the possibilities for new pages will expand, as well.

New City Pages Added

There are now new City Pages for Charlotte and San Francisco .  The San Francisco page has the Offers and Community tabs, while the Charlotte page does not.

Since City Pages seem to follow on the heels of  Google “community building”, I expect the next City Pages to be for Seattle, Brooklyn and Manhattan.

City Pages Toolbar PageRank

I don’t know if my toolbar PR is out of whack, but have you looked at the toolbar PR of the City Pages lately?  Mine reads:

• Portland 4
• Austin 6
• Madison 5
• San Diego 4

The new pages for San Francisco and Charlotte are not showing any PR on the toolbar, yet. Neither does the main /city/ page.

I entered the City Pages “home page” into SEOmoz to get a peak at the authority of the /city/ subfolder. Here’s what I got:

It’s going to be pretty darn difficult to beat Google at this Local Search game!