Mike Blumenthal

Much has been written about reputation management in the Local arena that focuses on tracking internet wide mentions of your company and dealing with negative reviews. As Miriam Ellis points out, communication with the unhappy party can go a long way towards resolving many  online reputation issues. But what if you are unable to track …

In the local space a number of us have reported on and studied factors that affect ranking in Google Maps. One factor that has been difficult for us to qualify, much less quantify, is that of “Location Prominence.”   In the organic world all are familiar with the concept of PageRank, a reiterative view of the …

David Mihm  has made an appearance on SEOMoz’s Whitebaord Friday: SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Local Search Inclusion with David Mihm from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

How do you know that you have been looking at Maps too long? When you wake up one morning fire up your screen, head on over to Maps and you notice that something just doesn’t feel right. Well sometime just before falling off to sleep it came to me, the logo was new. Not exactly …

I have always found StreetView very cool but very frustrating due to the infinite time spent navigating the view. Google has introduced an upgrade that now makes it much more usable. From the Lat-Long Blog announcing the upgrade: Today, we are really excited to introduce a new mode of navigation which liberates you from the …

Google has apparently introduced a new service – a Google Whitelist Feeds Beta that allows for information from trusted bulk feeds to be automatically verified. I had been hearing about a Local Business Center data feed that offered whitelisting and automatic verification from several sources. I have been unable to get confirmation from Google that the service …

Recently David Mihm had a very insightful piece on problems with Google Maps, quality, security, complexity and the LBC. One of his criticisms revolved around the phone verification process. He noted: As if the verification process weren’t cumbersome enough, the exact “flow” of Google’s automated phone message leaves many business owners thinking “What do I do …

GigaOm analyzes the O3D browser plug-in that Google introduced last month that displays rich 3D graphics. It portends a day in the not too distant future when the browser by default, handles the complexities of a 3D geo environment with ease and speed. It points towards a rich mapping environment where Google Maps takes on the sophistication of Google …

There was a fair bit of comment about small business naming practices for the internet in general and Google Maps in particular after the recent upgrade to their listing guidelines. The discussion revolved around the ambiguity that exists in the naming practices in small businesses and how that should best be projected into Maps to …