Last week, Dr. Pete Meyers of Moz, posted on Twitter that he had seen a new deskop pack result that seemed to be replacing the Carousel. He has emailed me to note that he is now seeing it on a number of broad queries “including “chicago restaurants”, “restaurant reviews”, “chinese menu”, and “vegas hotels””.

James Gibbons also reported a search result where the carousel had been replaced with a 7-pack,

As Pete noted in his email most of the new results that he was seeing were in place of the carousel AND the result mirrors exactly what is currently shown in mobile.The mobile change over occurred last April.

Will Google change away from the carousel? I am not a betting man and Google does do a lot of testing but my gut says that they just might move towards this new display. They have been on a toot to “clean up” the visuals on the main search result page (fewer packs, no author photos, fewer video and review snippets) and this change fits that mold.

Have you seen this result? What browser were you using? What phrases?

Update: I am now seeing this result using Firefox on my Mac searching for “vegas hotel“:

See other searches:

Continue reading Google Testing Carousel Replacement →

This could very well be old news. I have no idea when these two things changed but Google has made a substantial update to both their local review policies and the “flag and fix inappropriate reviews” form and help pages.

The new “flag as inappropriate” form has more fields and is also more generic and it appears that it applies to more than just reviews:

Of more interest is the increased detail in the Local Review Policy (previously referred to as the “Review content policy“). Here is the new Local Review Policy:

Content policies

We’ll remove content that violates any of the content policies below:

• Advertising: Don’t use reviews for advertising, such as adding links to other websites or phone numbers. Reviews should be a genuine reflection of your experience with a place – don’t post reviews just to manipulate a place’s ratings.
• Spam: Please don’t spam. Write a genuine report of your experience with the place. Don’t include promotional / commercial content, and don’t post the same content multiple times.
• Phone numbers or URLs: To help prevent advertising and spammy reviews, we don’t allow phone numbers or links to other websites in reviews. If you want to add an updated number or URL for the business you’re reviewing, use the Report a problem link to report that information instead.
• Off-topic reviews: Don’t post reviews based on someone else’s experience, or that are not about the specific place you’re reviewing. Reviews aren’t meant to be a forum for general political or social commentary or personal rants. Wrong location or the place is closed? Use the Report a problem link to report that information instead of writing a review.
• Keep it clean: Don’t use obscene, profane, or offensive language. We’ll also remove reviews that represent personal attacks on others.
• Conflict of interest: Reviews are most valuable when they are honest and unbiased. If you own or work at a place, please don’t review your own business or employer. Don’t offer or accept money, products, or services to write reviews for a business or to write negative reviews about a competitor. If you’re a business owner, don’t set up review stations or kiosks at your place of business just to ask for reviews written at your place of business.
• Illegal content: Don’t post reviews that contain or link to unlawful content, like links that facilitate the sale of prescription drugs without a prescription.
• Copyrighted content: Don’t post reviews that infringe other’s rights – including copyright. For more information or to file a DMCA request, review our copyright procedures.
• Sexually Explicit Material: We don’t allow reviews that contain sexually explicit material. Also, we absolutely don’t allow reviews that sexually exploit children or present them in a sexual manner. For this type of content, we’ll remove the review, shut down the account, and send a report to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and law enforcement.
• Impersonation: Don’t post reviews on behalf of others or misrepresent your identity or connection with the place you’re reviewing.
• Personal and confidential information: Don’t post reviews that contain another person’s personal and confidential information, including credit card information, government identification number, driver’s license information, etc.
• Hate Speech: We don’t allow reviews that advocate against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Obviously, most of the above policies have been integrated into the review spam algo and lead to auto flagging of reviews.

Google notes on the Flag and Fix Inappropriate Reviews page that a user can get their review to show by bringing it in compliance with the above:

If a review you wrote has been flagged and removed, you can fix it yourself. Edit your review to follow our policies (for example, remove a phone number or URL link). Your review will be automatically republished.

As Priya Chandra (a rising star in the Google Business forums) points out below, Google has also made a clear and unambiguous statement about not using reviews as a forum for political or social commentary on their Tips for writing great reviews page:

Reviews not General Commentary: At times certain locations may become the subject of larger public debate or conversation due to recent news coverage or current events. While we respect and value your opinion, Local Reviews are not meant for social or political commentary. We think there are other forums that are more suited to those kinds of conversations, like blogs or social networks. Please write about your firsthand experience with the place and not general commentary on the place in relation to recent news.

Here are the review guidelines as captured in May, 2013 by the WaybackWhacky Machine: Continue reading Google Updates Review Policy Help Files and Review Flagging Form →

Gigaom reports that there is a new class action suit against Yelp for security law violations:

The complaint alleges Yelp violated securities law by committing “fraud on the market,” and claims that executive sold stock when the price was near a high of almost $90 in February; the price fell sharply shortly after this in light of the negative publicity surrounding the FTC complaints.

This suit, rather than attacking Yelp’s practices directly are alleging that Yelp made “false and misleading statements about their true business and financial condition” in regards to the “robustness of their algorithms designed to screen reviews” and the Company’s growth prospects and the “extent to which they were reliant upon undisclosed business practices”.

From the filing:

It will be interesting to see if these new angles of “attack” on Yelp are any more successful than previous suits.

Here is the complete filing for Curry vs Yelp.

Search modifiers, both those used by Google and those frequently used by searchers are interesting. In the case of the former, a change in how Google handled the phrase “near” led to some overstated numbers. In the case of the latter, I wondered whether any of them are effective proxies for measuring the increase in voice based mobile search.

The one that came to mind in this scenario was the modifier: “Nearby”. At least for me it is a phrase that I only use when searching on my phone via voice and when I am away from home. It is a modifier that I rarely ever use in desktop search (although I can imagine its use in Maps). Who knows whether that is true broadly but I was still curious.

In that vein I proceeded to Google trends and queried on the frequency of the use of the phrase Nearby in the US as to what I would see and what it might show.

This chart is interesting in several ways.
Continue reading “Nearby” – A Proxy for Voice Based Mobile Search? →

The recent Google Local Update (aka Pigeon) was very disruptive. Although as I wrote at the time and reiterate, only when we actually look at measurable results can we both understand its actual impact and perhaps understand more of what was happening and what changes Google has made.

There were two main parts to the update as expressed by Google:
– Local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals.
– The new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.

My tea leave translation of that?
– We are moving the algos that dictated page and location prominence closer together. We are integrating brand preferences and entity rank into our main algo and using more of that as a common ranking process across both the web and local results.

-We are better able to ascertain location in both mobile and desktop environments and have, for the most part drawn smaller radius around the presumed location of the searcher from which to draw the local search results.

From where I sit, the first part of this change has been happening for a while and as David noted at SEL was largely seen first with the Hummingbird roll out.

It also appears to me that the improvements to their distance and location ranking parameters  and the attendant redrawing of the local boundaries, at least on the desktop, is actually causing the more dramatic shifts in measurable desktop results.

Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry (and others that I have looked at as well) was strongly impacted by that second change. The search radius, which had previously expanded to include the shopping suburbs of Buffalo (Williamsville, Amherst etc) had once again contracted to just include the city of Buffalo proper. You can see this when you do a search like Jewelry Buffalo. Google had effectively reduced the diameter of the search radius from 12 to 6 miles

The impact of the reduction in local Pack visibility for Barbara is obvious in Google’s My Business Insights with reduced impressions:

Continue reading Pigeon – An Anecdotal Impact Report →

Have you ever thought: I really want to spend tonight reading Mike’s back library but I just don’t know where to start?

Phil Rozek thought you might and wanted to make your job easier. He pored through the 2400 articles I have written since day one, drove them through the absolute best local algo (Miriam Ellis, David Mihm, Dave Oremland, Andrew Shotland, Nyagoslav Zhekov & Phil himself) to come up with a list of The Best of Blumenthal (so far).

So if you really ever did think that you actually did want to spend some time perusing my back library this is probably the place to start….. a list of articles curated by some of the best in the local search. And people that I am lucky to have met along the way and become friends with.

Now me? I am off to listen to the greatest hits of Jan & Dean.