Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Entries Written By Mike Blumenthal
Google Places Forum Adds Tags Discussion Area
Late yesterday Google added a new discussion category, Discuss Google Tags with other users, in the Google Places Help Forums. It is billed as a place to “learn more about Google Tags and discuss the same with other users”. Having followed the forums regularly Tags discussions have occurred only sporadically. In the last Places Newsletter Google …
Google Announces Full Support for Microformats in Local
The Lat-Long Blog has announced that Google is now supporting rich snippets as a mechanism for identifying the specific location that a webpage is referring to: From a local search perspective, part of this effort means looking for all the great web pages that reference a particular place. The Internet is teeming with useful information …
Google Places Coupons Now Integrating Coupons from CitySearch
It appears that Google is bulking up Places Pages with coupons from CitySearch. I had not seen any third party coupons in Places previously but according to Google the ability for “various partners to make coupons and other content available on the Place page has been available for some time”. I ran across the coupon sharing …
Google Adds Slideshow Option to Place’s Photos
Google has just announced on the Lat-Long Blog that images on a Places Page, whether uploaded by the owner or included via Panoramio, are now viewable in a slide show mode. From the Lat-Long blog: Today, we’re offering you a better, more streamlined way to view these photos. With this new feature, you can easily …
Review Spam Under Attack by the FTC
I somehow missed this FTC enforcement action when it was released at the end of August. The FTC used the blogging disclosure guidelines that it released at the end of 2009 to slap the hands of an advertising firm that had it’s employee post reviews on iTunes without full disclosure. From the NY Times article: …
Things Google Knows to Be True
Update 9/10: Matt Mcgee reports on Searchengineland that Google has returned the philosophy page back to its original wording and disagrees with the assessment that they are a portal. I would note that regardless of the content of their philosophy page or any denials, if it walks like a duck….. etc. etc. etc., it is …
Google Maps & Places – Quirks, Bugs and Edge Cases…
Last week, I joined the internet revolution as our household finally moved off of dial up and received DSL from Verizon. It was a long time coming and a path full of Verizon delays, but as a result I have been spending more time in the Google Places forums. This is an activity that never …
How Will Google Instant Affect Local Search?
Google Instant, Google’s new predictive search result product, is being widely hyped…the end of SEO, not the end of SEO… While it is unlikely to be apocoplytic and end SEO as we know it, it does seems destined to change searcher behavior. That change is likely to affect SEO tactics in general and local SEO …
Facebook Places – Where are they?
What do a popular Anaheim florist, a prominent law office in a large urban area, a rural web development firm and a large retail bank/atm location all have in common? They all are in the Localeze index and yet Facebook Places does not know about their existence. Why this occurs and how many businesses are missing …
Integrating Your Bike Into the Local Social World
I am an avid biker. A low tech, drive an old clunker, commute 9 miles on a back country road to work kind of biker. But a biker none the less. I really love my 33 minute commute along the Allegany River every day on my way to work. Going home at the end of …
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