Google Places Hack: Barnacle Marketing Goes Black

Update 8:00 am: Steve points out below that this is not just a hack but a bug in how Google handles the URL from the Places Page. Thus even when a Places Listing points to the specific directory page for a business, the Google SERP can interpret and rank the URL based on the higher …

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Loci 2010 – Ted Paff

Ted Paff is the President of Customer Lobby, a solution to help local businesses to get, manage and publish customer reviews. Prior to founding Customer Lobby, Ted was an entraprenuer, venture capitalist and investment banker. He has been a guest blogger here before writing the popular Responding to Negative Reviews – Your Prospects are the …

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Google Customer Service: Up Against the Algo

I was approached by two bed and breakfasts whose Places listing had merged. They have all of the standard problems of being in the same business and being located right next to each other. They have the additional problems of one of the businesses previously having the current phone number for the other business. It …

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Loci 2010 – David Mihm

David Mihm is the President & CEO of GetListed.org, in addition to running his own Portland-based search engine consulting business. He’s a Search Engine Land columnist and a frequent speaker at the SMX, SES, and Kelsey Group conference. He has created a number of tools to assist the SMB in navigating the rough waters of …

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How Much Traffic Do Local Sites Get from Google?

We are at the beginning of a new era of search that some folks are calling social search. Some businesses are seeing web traffic from the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The local businesses are under constant pressure to try new local marketing channels and often are not sure of how to proceed. But for …

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Loci 2010 – Sebastien Provencher

Sebastien is Praized Media’s co-founder and VP Product Management. He has more than 12 years’ experience in local search, interactive entertainment and online media. Sebastien co-founded Praized Media in 2007 to help local media companies tap into the growing potential of online word-of-mouth and social media. Praized Media recently launched Needium, an innovative social media …

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Google Places Dashboard: How to Make % Complete = 100%

A question that comes up all too frequently because Google has included a grade in the Places Dashboard rating the completeness of a listing, is: how do you make a Places listing 100% complete? It is soon followed by the question: will it affect my ranking or the results? Let me answer the second question …

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Loci 2010 – Greg Sterling

Who better to start off Loci 2010 than Greg Sterling? Greg is an indefatigable writer (how does he get anything else done?) and provides the strategic insights as well as the scoop on the “daily deal” to all of us in the industry. He can be found at Screenwerk, SearchEngineland and Internet2Go. He speaks at …

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Most Popular Articles from 2010 and Before

There are many ways to judge an article’s popularity and worth (two distinct concepts for sure and they don’t always correlate). One is page views, another is retweets and the one that I consider most important, number of comments. Unfortunately, given time constraints and lack of the technology to quickly and easily track total tweets …

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Loci 2010: Important Trends in Local

1. Particular postions, points or places 2. Centers of activity, attention, or concentration Loci 2010 is a year end review of articles in Local Search that will be appearing over the next week(s). It is a series that I started in at the end of 2008 and and this will make its third appearance. For …

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