Mike Blumenthal

Yesterday I wrote of Google now allowing user correction of unverified business listings in Google Maps. It was reported by Barry Schwartz and repeated elsewhere that I, in part, played a part in this outcome. Well it has been a sort of Charlie Brown moment…. You know, when Lucy holds out the football every fall …

In the recent past, Google Maps has had some glaring errors in data accuracy due to their heavy reliance on on their assignment algorithm. As of late last night, Google implemented two changes to help improve the situation. Firstlly they are now providing an active alert that the business record is unverified. More importantly, if …

Google has difficult a programming problem that they are attempting to solve in Google Maps. There are somewhere on the order of 25 million businesses in the U.S. and there are perhaps more than 25 billion web pages for (some of) those businesses in their index. Google, in their Maps product, wants to gather as …

I don’t think that this is the case but at SeoRoundTable there is a posting in regards to Local Business Listing being hijacked that was based on a discussion at a Digital Point Forum thread: I have a client, who did not register a business listing on Google maps, but their competitor took the time …

With the recent upgrade to the Google Local Onebox, Google has introduced a significant change to their main search engine result ranking of these local results. I have previously noted that there was a discrepancy between the Local Onebox rankings and the ranking results in Google Maps. With this update, it appeared at first glance …

Comscore released their data on biggest traffic gainers for 2006. One of their conclusions related to Local: “Google’s popularity has been driven by… the rapid uptake of some of Google’s applications beyond traditional Web search…examples include…62-percent growth in visitors to Google Maps” With Google’s recent upgrade of the Local OneBox this trend should continue in …

Matt McGee in a recent post, Google Maps push further into regular SERPs clearly laid out some significant changes that Google had made in the Local OneBox. I would like to add to his list. From Matt’s post: In its post, Google is trumpeting the fact that this new display now shows rating/reviews to make …

Google is now presenting an enhanced local onebox that includes a map and more details from their Google Maps database. The effect of the change is to totally dominate the main search results with details about the top three local businesses. There are a number of additional options to access more information & directions from …

On 1/20/07, I wrote on the Google Blog: Jen (Google Map Guide) We work with a local restaurant that when viewed in Google Maps has but one review from CitySearch dated September 2005. There have been a number of subsequent customer reviews posted on this restaurant at CitySearch, Yahoo and Yelp since May, 2006 and …