Mike Blumenthal

Over the past 48 hours, both personally and in the forums I have seen a large number of inquiries as to why rankings had dropped, why reviews had disappeared, why citations had gone missing, why the LBC had stopped showing stats and impressions had dropped to zero in Google Maps. From the Forums in just …

Given how much I have complained about Google Map’s slightly sadistic & wildly misleading suspension message: System Error – We’re sorry, but we are unable to serve your request at this time. Please try back in a few minutes, I don’t know how I missed the recent transition to the new, improved & now easily …

Recently, Google Maps has been enforcing spam penalties more rigorously. Even Locksmith results seem to be improving. So it was surprising to see a report in the forums that the Authoritative OneBox was showing for this very broad search for Breast Augmentation New Jersey . Not only was it a single listing on a broad …

Last week when Google Map’s new Place’s pages were introduced it was noted that they were not going to be indexed (there is a great discussion going on at Greg’s blog now) leaving the impression amongst many that they would sit, isolated, in the Maps siloh. They would, it was thought, only be seen to …

Google Maps is rolling out a new UI upgrade, the “Places” page, worldwide to replace the tabbed interface text view in Maps. The rollout, beginning today, will take place over the next week. The new interface provides a single page where all information about a “Place” is visible in well, one place. Google has taken …

One of the less than ideal aspects of Google showing Local Universal results is the display of an Authoritative OneBox for a broad local search like “Las Vegas Computer Repair“. However,since mid August, there have been a number of reports (here, here, here, here) in both the forums and in communications from Local Search Marketers Dev …

Google Maps and the Local Business Center have been hell for hospitals. Virtually everything that could go wrong with Maps has gone wrong when it comes to hospitals getting their many listings correct in the LBC and the Maps index with the technical issues compounded by the lack of customer support. This has been an …

Google Maps Local Business Center has a few quirks. One of those is how it handles names with two capital letters. Businesses sometimes spend millions projecting their names and are meticulous about how they appear in any media. It must be discouraging to firms like McAdams Floral in Victoria, TX and McDonald’s that Google Maps does not …

I am fascinated by the intersection of Local and our every day lives. The Internet has moved from the era of local questions and world wide answers to the era of local answers to world wide queries. Google Maps, because of its immense reach, is at the center of this confluence. Real people with real …

As David Mihm pointed out in his recent Search Engine Land article summarizing some of the issues with local categories, there has been a lot of discussion about categorization in Google Maps. A number of suggestions for ways that Google might facilitate SMB interaction with the Local Business Center were offered. In addition to penalties …