Mike Blumenthal

Google has confirmed that anonymous reviews have in fact been removed from public view. Their statement to me: “We do not allow anonymous reviews today and we’ve removed legacy anonymous reviews.” If you recall, on May 24th, I reported their disappearance with the article Google Stops Counting Anonymous Reviews?. Given the obvious angst that many small …

From GetFiveStars, a new post about two business that are suing because of reviews (always a fascinating topic to me):  Reviews & Lawsuits – You Can Win for Losing and You Can Lose for Winning        From LocalU, my weekly conversation with Mary Bowling: Important Links from Last Week in Local – June 11 From …

Yesterday, Sergey Alakov and SearchEngineRountable reported a new siting in the Local Knowledge Panel: See What’s in Store. Today, Google has announced on Inside AdWords that as part if its new inventory feed program, See What’s in Store will be a free feature. From the Adwords Blog post: Onboarding to both local catalog ads and …

To paraphrase David Letterman, Google My Business Guidelines are like traffic signals to New Yorkers… just a rough suggestion. Google clearly states in the guidelines that “your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers. Accurately representing your business name helps customers find …

The search “restaurants in Mountain View” seems to be returning interesting test of late. Yesterday we saw a feature snippet, schema driven list replace the local pack. In this test we Interesting Finds supplement the pack. These were first spotted by Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineRountable in early April in the context of a Mother’s day …

In the EU and the US, Yelp has been actively seeking to get regulators to look at Google’s behaviors in local and to change the search results to stop favoring Google’s own local results. Yelp’s Luther Lowe noted: When a mother does a search for a pediatrician in Berlin, instead of being matched with rich …

Petra Kraft, a long time Local SEO and careful observer in the hospitality space, noticed an interesting test in Google Posts. She found a Knowledge Panel where Google was showing six posts using the primary image and a text over lay and the abilitly to see more via a right arrow. This is one of …

On June 13, Google Websites will be one year old. It was created to satisfy the needs of the very small business to have an easy, fast mobile website. In that time Google has managed to have had at least 2.2 million of the sites built. Given that Google also allows a business to purchase …

Update: Over the weekend many of these “A Google User Reviews” were removed from the corpus as well as the count. I just got this email from my favorite pet client, Barbara Oliver. She watches her reviews like a hawk and is very protective of them: I noticed today that I have 139 google reviews …

At the LSA 18 Conference in Chicago (at friggin’ 8 am*) Anita Yuen, from the Google My Business team, announced new features focusing on the small(ish) and bigger agency market. “GMB now delivers a tailored experience for agencies and platform partners”. 3 Key investments Updated API – coming Messaging API Improved Search APIs across location …