Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Entries Written By Mike Blumenthal
Adwords Express: Things that are Easy to Hate
I have a love hate relationship with the elegantly simple Google’s Adwords Express. One of the things I love is that for a business with more than 2 reviews and greater than an 4 star rating, it will show your star rating with the ad. One of the things I hate is that, unbeknownst to …
Google Places Descriptor Snippets
One of the changes in the rollout of the new Places Page last month was the inclusion of short descriptor snippets high on the page between the review count and the business description. The descriptor snippets, besides recently changing from a light grey to black in color, have seemed to improve somewhat over the last month. In the case …
Small Business Influencers 2011 Awards Final Results – Thanks to All!
Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends announced the Top 100 Champions and Honorable mentions in their Small Business Influencers 2011 Awards. I am happy to say that Lisa Barone AND I were both awarded a spot in the list of Top 100 Small Business Champions. We are in rare company with the likes of Aaron Wall, John Jantsch, Inc. Magazine and Intuit and …
Is Google’s Free “Get Your Business Online” Website Soon to Roll Out Nationwide?
Google has been slowly rolling out their “Get Your Business Online” free seminar/website initiative worldwide. They first offered a similar program to SMBs in the UK in February 2010. Earlier this year, Google rolled out the program in Ireland and Canada and apparently updated their UK program. Some of the programs have had some fine print …
How Much Freeer than Free Can Free Be?
Stever of Axemedia passed this Register.com email solicitation along to me. It is a deceptive ad that attempts to leverage Google Places as a benefit to the package. How much freer than free can free be? I suppose that the offer revolves around some claiming package but is amazing to me that a company of …
Update: Boost Ad Buries A-Business Listing–> Not According to Google
Update Wednesday 8/17: Google checked into this situation and claims on the digital/computer science equivalent of a stack of bibles that this was just a coincidence. Here is the communication that was forwarded to me: After looking into the customer’s situation, we can confirm that there is no connection between the AdWords Express ad being …
Google Related – Making Buried Information From Places More Visible
Google has just released a new browser plugin (Chrome & IE) tool, Google Related that provides information that Google thinks is relevant to a given website that you are visiting. The tool, while working across a range of e-commerce, information & local websites, is of particular interest in the local space as it provides direct …
Clarification re: Clarification re: closed listings on Google Places
This clarification from Google arrived late yesterday afternoon in regards to my articles on the Reported to Be Closed feature and perhaps did not receive the visibility that it deserved. When I showed it to Joey, my PR guy, he felt that a clarification to the clarification was necessary. Google’s and Joey’s clarification follow. —— …
News Flash: Google Mt View Reported Closed!
In the spirit of discovery, I have once again embarked on a project to determine exactly how many “closing reports” are required to actually show a business as closed on their Places Page. The answer: Only 2 even if you are Google. Update 12:39: 16 minutes after it was reported as closed, the listing had …
Places Blackhat Playground – Reported To Be Closed
It seems that the newest blackhat playground of user generated input annoyance is the “Place is permanently closed” radio button in Google Places. I have been receiving an increasing number of complaints from readers that are seeing the flag. In fact Barbara Oliver Jewelry and Andrews Jewelers both experienced the dreaded yellow highlight on their Places …
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