Mike Blumenthal

David Mihm is back from England and joined Mary Bowling and myself to talk about the previous week in local. This week’s Local U deep dive video takes a look at David Mihm’s recently released Local Search Ranking Factors. This is the sixth installment of our Deep Dive Into Local series, for the week ending 9/25/15. The …

Tim Colling and Helmut Schmidt (Google Local TC Extraordinaire) both pointed out to me that if you add the word ‘phone’ to your keyword local search, Google DOES in fact surface the phone number. Thus while a search like emergency services buffalo or emergency plumber buffalo would not return a phone number (even though they should…Google …

Chris Alphen of EarlyOftenNow just noted in a comment on my post about the reappearance of phone numbers in the 3 Pack, their disappearance! A quick check across browsers that were showing phone numbers, confirm that they are once again not showing. For those of you that are not following the drama, to the dismay …

Frank Kockritz of Ascend Local pointed out this recent Fox News Clip from earlier in the week announcing a $1000 penalty against a Staten Island women for writing a scathing Yelp review of a flooring company, Mr. Sandless OF Staten Island. According to the court documents: On March 4, 2015 identified as “Emily” she posted the …

Jennifer Slegg of theSEMPost is reporting the return of phone numbers to the Local 3 Pack results. I am not yet seeing them on my Mac with Safari, Chrome or Firefox although some others are reporting seeing them. Update: As of about 5:00 pm eastern they were showing world wide.  Certainly their return would prove …

Service businesses have been in a tizzy of late worrying about the possible demise of the local pack and its replacement by the Home Services Ad format. This would effectively monetize all of the prime real estate in local search and interject Google into their quoting process. Maybe this screen shot will provide a small safe …

Join Mary Bowling, David Mihm and me for the newest Deep Dive in Local Video. Each week we share our thoughts about the critical news and events in the past week in local. In the second half of that weekly video  we take a deeper strategic and tactical dive into one interesting area that caught their attention during the week and …

Earlier today Google announced an educational and legal attack on deceptive robo calling that has and continues to run rampant in the local space. Google mentioned in their blog today that they had filed a lawsuit. I have just read through the filing and it reads like one of my rants against this sort of …

Update: Details of Google’s Robo Calling Lawsuit Against Local Lighthouse are now available. Apparently Google is not going to take the abuse from robo callers any more. Today Google is publicly starting to educate the public about rob caller’s abuses in Google’s name AND has apparently initiated its first law suit against a search marketing …