Mike Blumenthal

Good News Bad News Update Monday, 9:00 am: Good: The Phone (and occasionally the chat) interface attached to the help link within the dashboard shows during business hours for support. Bad: It doesn’t appear to be working and you should continue to use the “old” way of clicking on the Contact Us link in the …

Dave Oremland sent me a Washington Post article last week detailing a case where small business owner Colleen Dermott of Dog Tranquility in Burke, VA was suing a client for $65,000. The client had left bad reviews on Yelp and Angie’s List. She claimed that the client,  Jennifer Ujimori, in leaving a bad review, had made …

Yext Power Listing tool has often been useful to me to find bad NAP. I would caution others though that it is primarily a selling tool not a diagnostic one. And one that seems to be manipulated to increase your sense of discomfort EVEN when there is improving NAP. By Yext’s measures 18 Listings improved, …

Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google (paywall – to get to it use this search result to get through)  is a look by the Wall Street Journal at the FTC staff report inadvertently released to them under a FOIA request. The staff findings “concluded that Google’s conduct has resulted—and will result—in real harm to consumers and to …

The Bold Italic is reporting on a film maker that is attempting to tell the Yelp is a bully story via a documentary. Yelp gets zero stars in an upcoming documentary by local filmmaker Kaylie Milliken. Her film, Billion Dollar Bully (which is halfway done, according to the International Business Times) focuses on complaints from restaurant owners about Yelp’s …

It has been confirmed that YellowPages.ca  (YP.ca) is no longer Google’s primary data supplier for business listings in Canada. But the story appears to be bigger than that and likely includes new terms in many countries whereby Google is now owning rather than licensing their business listing data. Google has, over the past year an …

Update 3/13 3:30 (our lucky day): Google has noted that hours are back to normal. Colan Nielsen of Imprezzio Marketing just noticed that Google has limited the hours of their phone support due to high call volumes: Our call centers have recently experienced high support volume and our GMB specialists are working hard to solve …

Many in the local search space have characterized the Google Local Guides program as a cheap imitation of Yelp’s Elite reviewer program. I suppose in some sense that is true but it appears to me that Google is bringing their own approach to the program and scaling it aggressively in a way that seems uniquely …

Chris Moreno of LocalLeads.com sent me this audio recording of a scammer pretending to be Google in their voice message to a small business. Chris asks what can be done to stop these folks. Very little given the current regulatory environment which pretty much takes a hands off approach to these sorts of scams. Education …

It appears that Yahoo seems to have forgotten that they have the Yelp review API or update it so infrequently that it is effectively useless. The reviews Yahoo is showing for many businesses are often 3 to 11 months out of date. Last year to much hooey and horse puckey, Yahoo “upgraded” their review system to grab reviews …