Mike Blumenthal

As noted by John Gruber, sometimes the pen can send a mighty message. Or rather in this case, a paint brush. Yesterday (Friday), The Mayor of DC declared part of a street that runs near the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza”, inaugurating the new plaza with giant yellow letters and a brand-new street sign. …

Update 6/14: Google has now started to index the site. As of now there are two of about 20 pages that have been indexed. Update 6/12: Good news. Kossars have fixed their robots.txt file and removed the disallow function that prevented Google from indexing them. Onward and upward. User-agent: * *************************************************** I was thinking about New …

Google My Business Websites, first released publicly in June of 2017, has passed 36 million sites created and continues on a strong upward trend. From the beginning, GMB Websites has seen strong growth, passing a million sites built within the first 6 months and really taking off,  passing 10 million sites built, by the fall …

Google has begun rolling out their Business Provider program to replace the Trusted Verifier Program that was recently terminated.  The Business Provider program is designed to let organizations like Chambers of Commerce or banks with small business clients facilitate a Google My Business Verification for their members or clients.  Groups or organizations share business data with …

On mobile, Google is showing a new image based search interface. It is currently a supplement to the 3 Pack for local keyword searches and it shows local results visually based on an image matching the search query. The new mobile focused search method does not yet appear on the desktop. It is not clear …

I seem to be hooked into Google’s test servers these days as I am seeing a lot of tests that include the good, the bad and the very ugly of local search tests. As well as the occasional WFT? In this most recent test, Google has taken the larger call to action and the suggested …

We have long noted that you rent but don’t own your business profile at Google. As Tim Capper has previously pointed out that is no more true than with the careless scraping of event sites that Google pulls off to add events to local search results.  You do though, just have to wonder when the …

Google always tests a lot and for some reason I have been seeing a number of these tests on one of my accounts on my iPhone. Changes in the layout of the mobile branded result were spotted by Joy in June. Here is another albeit an obvious test as I am only seeing on one …

My nephew and his fiancee recently moved back to Buffalo NY from San Francisco. Their dream was to help create and foster the art scene in the reviving Buffalo urban culture. So they created the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (aka BICA)1.  They bought some gallery space and put up a somewhat inadequate  SquareSpace website2. …