Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Entries Written By Mike Blumenthal
The Annual Print Yellow Page Page Count And Other Dead Horses
It’s time for the annual print Yellow Page count. And I promised last year to stop beating that dead horse… so this year I will beat several. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. Page counts in my local print version have declined once again by over 10%. The good news for …
Google Pre-Announces Plus Features for Bulk
Alert reader Nico has pointed out that Google has publicly committed to the rollout of Plus features for bulk upload users on their Help Pages. We’ve listened carefully to your feedback. In the future, you’ll be able to: Make updates and posts to your customers using the Google+ page for your location See Insights to …
Google Announces Upgraded Schema Support
Today on the Google webmaster blog Google has announced upgraded Schema support for additional phone types and detailed specific recommendations for using Schema.org on location pages. It is unfortunate but Google did not include a new schema for call tracking. Obviously this granular detail is useful for achieving more accuracy in Knowledge Graph answer boxes. …
Google Upgrades Bulk Upload Again
Update: Google has confirmed that the new bulk upload uses the same “one claim rule” as the new Places Dashboard and Plus. This means that once an account has been upgraded that the listings will not be able to be claimed into either Google Plus/Places Dashboard or another bulk account (at least not one that …
Reviews: Sometimes You Miss the Forrest for the Trees
American business is very focused on goals and measurements. This in particularly true is the sales world. Unfortunately when you treat reviews as the goal it can lead to bad outcomes. A review ask is one step in developing a long term relationship with a customer; it is not an end point. Making it a …
Matt Cutts: Google Plus to Receive Manual Penalty
Google has in the past penalized it’s own properties five times for breaking its own SEO rules. Matt Cutts has apparently now also sanctioned Google Plus with a manual penalty. Here are the comments from the internal email that was forwarded to me: “Forks or no forks, we believe that the Plus team has overdone …
Should a Local Business Use Just a Local Page or a A Brand Page And a Local
I have written before about the fact that it is not possible to merge a G+ Page for local with other page types like brand or company. But the question of the relative value of one page versus another is an om-going question for me. Is there a benefit to having both page types if …
Google Updates Bulk Feed
Posted from 20,000 ft on my iPhone so forgive any typos. Googler Jade, who seems to be everywhere these days doing everything, just posted these notes about an upgrade to the bulk tool: Importing a spreadsheet to the bulk upload tool is now improved. Now, when you import a file, you’ll see a preview of …
Reviews: If it is Good Enough to Do, It’s Good Enough to Do in Excess
File this under: Bosses come up with the worst ideas category or perhaps in the “it felt so good shooting myself in the left foot, let me do it in my right one as well” category. This comment was recently posted on my GOOGLE: REVIEW CONTESTS VIOLATE GUIDELINES article from a Mrs G. Mrs G. (1 …
Google Maps Report a Problem: Does It Work For Local Spam?
Google’s crowd sourced map building and listing has succeeded on a number of fronts at allowing maps and listings to be updated at a pace that no one else in the industry can keep up. While the mapping side has little economic incentive for cheating, the listing side is prime for self serving activities. For …
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