Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Entries Written By Mike Blumenthal
Google Rolls Boost Out to 11 Additional Cities & Illinois
Google just announced that Boost, their new simplified Local Adword Product, is now available in the following cities: * San Jose * Seattle * Wichita * Charlottesville (VA) * Atlanta * Chapel Hill * Orlando * Washington D.C. * Boston * Cross Plains (TX) * Portland (ME) * All local businesses in Illinois. The announcement …
Google Places Upgrade: Reviews with Sentiments & Hotel Booking Tool
Along with the recent rollout of Hotpot, Google has added new review related features to the Places Page. The first, available on restaurants and hotels (perhap more but not on every type of business) allows you to summarize sentiment about the location: Restaurant: Hotel: The ability to quickly and easily add sentiment will further build …
Google Hotpot – Yelp Meets Netflix in a Local Recommendation Engine
In August I asked: Will Reviews Become Google’s First Successful Foray into Social? It struck me at the time that reviews were Google’s strongest and most successful play into the social world. Google had succeeded with Places to garner a significant number of reviews and with the owner review response feature to garner a strong, …
ReviewBiz – Making Reviews Friction Free
I am a big fan of an ethical review solicitation process that smooths the path between customers and creating reviews. If reviews are going to reflect the overall impression of your business accurately, a broad sampling of your customers needs to participate and it needs to be easy. I think that the opportunity to easily …
Google Coupons Joining the Witness Protection Program as Google Offers
You won’t have Google Coupons to kick around anymore. It appears that they are joining the witness protection program under a new name: Google Offers. Google Coupons had been the Rodney Dangerfield of Google local products, always hidden, never talked about and for years, after an optimistic start in 2006, they languished. Until Google removed …
Goog-411 R.I.P. – I’ll Miss You
Update 10:43 EST: Perhaps I am in ever hopeful denial or perhaps someone at Google forgot to turn out the lights but when I just dialed 1-800-Goog-411, it answered and was still working! I have followed Goog-411 from its seriptitious inception masquerading as a non-Google service called 520-find, to its bizarre rural advertising campaign, to the …
Google Places Upgrades Owner Review Response Feature
Owners responding to reviews is a volatile arena where most anything can happen. Despite discretion being the better part of valor, silence rarely is the option chosen. When the Google Places owner response feature was not functioning this week, this owner responded to a negative review with a review of his own: It appears that …
Google Places – 12 Step Checklist for a Great Listing
Google Places Help is now offering a nifty, interactive “checklist” that drives SMBs through the correct help documents and in the correct order to learn the basics of creating a successful Places listing:
Google Places: Google Confirms New Review Removal Practices
Google Employee Stephan S has just posted this in the Places Forum post to report “missing” reviews confirming that Google has started to remove reviews (bold is mine): As mentioned in this forum previously, we’re currently experiencing an issue that is preventing us from showing some reviews on Place pages. We’re working to correct this …
Google Places: Selective Reviews Now Being Removed
Update: Google Confirms New Review Removal Practices Google appears to be actively removing some reviews from Places listings. Some of the recent problems of reviews being lost are clearly algo based and reports of lost reviews continue to pile up in the forums. But my poking around in Places indicates that there is more intentionality than bug …
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