Google MapMaker Nukes Custom Categories

Custom categories, long missing from Google Maps, had retained their presence in MapMaker.  That distinction has now ended. MapMaker has announced the end of custom categories and that MapMaker would now use the standard 2500+ categories that have been available to My Business and Maps. Hello Mappers, Firstly, a BIG thanks for your continued support …

Continue reading

Google Pigeon Poo

With every update from Google we often get artifacts that are very annoying. With the Pigeon Local Update we have our share of Pigeon Poo. Barry Schwartz pointed out the inclusion of Expedia in the carousel. Stefano Romero, Mike Ehline, Casey Meraz and David Perez have all pointed out similar, equally bad examples of Pigeon Poo type …

Continue reading

Yelp Reports $0.00 per Share Earnings

Yelp has just released their June ending numbers. I wanted to lead with a realistic headline before the other pundits did. While profit has never been something that Yelp crows about there are some interesting numbers: Cumulative reviews grew 44% year over year to approximately 61 million and and approximately 40% of new reviews were …

Continue reading

Whitespark Reports a 24% Decline in Local Packs

Last week I reported that MozCast was showing a decline of over 60% in display of the Local Pack on Google after the recent local algo update. Moz was gracious enough to share their data and it was determined that their search queries had been obsoleted  by the update. So while their data was internally …

Continue reading

Crap Google Results & Yelp

Yelp is obviously very, very good with their SEO. They apparently have the ability to sculpt their internal link values to highlight what appear to be the most popular local businesses in the Google local results. Apparently their ability to do that in their strongest markets is even greater than elsewhere. These results, first highlighted …

Continue reading