Mike Blumenthal

With the rollout of the new Google Guidelines and the @maptavists exploits, there has been a very lively discussion about Google and whether they are active enough in removing spam and in creating an even playing field. Dan Austin made the point with this comment. Please read his comment below prior to taking the poll. …

Google has announced an update to their Places Guidelines and now is explicitly allowing owners to add a descriptor, via the Places or Plus Dashboard, that helps people locate the business or describes what the business offers. From the post (bold is mine to highlight the significant change): Your title should reflect your business’s real-world title. In …

Update: Google has taken these down. My sense is, in speaking with him, that @maptivist views that as a challenge. Nyagoslav Zhekov wrote a blog post yesterday detailing a long standing MapMaker abuse vector. The person claiming to be responsible, @maptivist, reached out to Darren, Nyagoslav and myself with some more examples of his MapMaker …

Todd Mintz highlighted this search result a few days ago on Google Plus. It so clearly illustrates why a business should take the time to fill out every aspect of their Google Plus Local profile, add at least one post AND add some photos of their choosing. If you don’t the borg’s machine will vacuum up …

In local, Hummingbird has produced a number of terrible search results. With its obsessive preference for brand as a search result, even when a searcher is obviously looking for a range of businesses, the algo often still returns but a single spammy result. I guess I am lucky that there are so many colorful synonyms …

Last week Yahoo announced their Yelp review partnership with a great deal of fanfare and bravado. Putting on a happy face is standard fare in these sorts of situations and Yahoo is no exception. The press ate it up and we saw headlines like: Yahoo-Yelp Partnership Another Bold Move for Marissa Mayer But the reality is that Yahoo …

Recently Anikait Chavan commented on an old post where I minimized the idea of link building to an SMB Google+ Page for local. With the many changes that has taken place with Google Local, his comment motivated me to revisit the idea of exactly how your Google+ Page for Local should fit into an overall marketing plan for your …

On Friday Sebastien Socha alerted me to the fact that Google was now including inline Knowledge Graph Dropdowns in general and local search results. Besides the fact that it provides mostly irrelevant, distracting. repetitive and non specific Wikipedia type results to very specific queries, I saw it as an annoying addition to local search with …