Mike Blumenthal

Greg Sterling found an ad today for 877-520-FIND that took him to http://www.520find.com/. He looked for but couldn’t find any ownership information. Other than a reference to LanLogic on the terms of use page. While the facts of ownership may be cloudy, there are several things that are clear: 1)The service works very well. I …

Curiouser and curiouser as they say. In a recent search in Google, the organic search results showed a link to the same search on Google Maps. This is an interesting way for Google to promote users accessing Google Maps but I have not seen this behavior very broadly. In fact I have never seen if …

About a month and half a go I spotted a trend that is interesting: The top three local listings on the Google Organic results page and the top three listings in Google Map are often not the same. This has implications for both optimization strategies for Google Organic AND going forward for the directory assistance …

Google’s voice driven directory assistance has removed the 877-GOOG-411 number and now automatically forwards any calls to that number to: 877-520-FIND. It is interesting that Google has not publicly acknowledged that the experiment is theirs and that the phone number has been changed to further distance themselves. Perhaps they didn’t want to seem like they …

In early October I wrote a post about achieving a “an automatically expanded Plus Box” for a client on a valued search phrase (Vacation Rentals Ellicottville NY) BUT having the url Google had associated with the listing pointing to their competitor. After postulating conspiracies and incompetancies on the part of all but myself I determined …

Greg Sterling highlighted some interesting comments. I was intrigued by the comment from an analyst: I know you were doing some testing with some retailers, putting their names in the bullets on the Maps and things. Can you talk about that at all? It appears that one of the means of monetization is a strong …

7)Using Google adwords in the local listing In a previous post about ranking well in Google Maps I listed 6 items that seemed to affect ranking. It seems that there may be a seventh. Although the sample size is limited, there is some evidence that having an adword campaign running in Google Maps adds authority …

Greg Sterling has a thoughtful post where he eflect on what are the “real” local numbers.