Mike Blumenthal

Ahmed Farooq alerted me to a new featurette of Google UK, a collection of the latest Internet stats. The page offers up a series of factoids gleaned from a number of resources in a “range of topics from macroscopic economic and media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time”. For example …

My wife’s business, whose business data was not widely distributed across the internet or offline but is in the Local Business Center, has received the following offer in a direct mail piece from Google: The offer, which drops to $75 after September 30 and expires on November 30th, offers this 6 Step program for her …

I will be speaking again this year at SMX East on the panel: Ranking Tactics For Local Search. Chaired by Greg Sterling, I will be joining a veritable who’s who in Local. The other speakers are (arranged alphabetically): Mary Bowling David Mihm Will Scott Andrew Shotland Please let me know if you will be there, …

Do you remember Bizarro World from Superman? A Wikipedia refresher: In the Bizarro world of “Htrae” (“Earth” spelled backwards), society is ruled by the Bizarro Code which states “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!”. In one episode, for …

There is another possible reason for the stats to drop to zero over night on the Local Business Center Dashboard: You’ve been penalized for category spamming . The new penalty, first noted by Chris Silver Smith last week, dings your listing and causes it to loose standing precipitously. It does not preclude you from editing your …

Google has announced in the Lat Long Blog that StreetView is now being associated with your Google Maps business listing in the info bubble. The info bubble and pin remain in view as the user moves to StreetView, The pin is persistent even as the view “moves down the street” providing some context to the …

A question that occasionally crops up in the forums is why would your Local Business Center dashboard all of a sudden show 0 impressions for your business listing in Google Maps? Nick Thomas, who has worked extensively in the Local Business Center, sent along his observations that identifies the likely cause: One interesting oddity is …

I have never been a big fan of the traditional Yellow Page companies and their tactics. They often would use FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) rather than ROI to convince small retailers in our rural area to take out more ads year over year. I suppose they were just doing what they needed to do …