Mining for Google Hummingbird Guano in So Cal

Google’s Hummingbird guano, like real guano, is fertile ground. Unfortunately, in the case of Google’s guano, it is fertile ground for spammers and spam and nothing as productive as farm crops. Southern California has always been a hot bed of Google local spam particularly in the legal industry. Yesterday I was exploring search results for …

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How Do I Merge Two Google+ Page Pages? A Very Common Question

Update July 2014: If you are looking to convert a Brand page to a Local page Google has recently released that functionality. Read about it here:  Google Now Allows Brand Pages to Become Google+ Local Pages Because of the slow and never ending transition of Places to Plus and because of less than stellar communications …

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Google Search Quality Issues Dogging Local Results

The front page of Google is where the action is.  It’s often where a business has the first opportunity to present their brand, it’s where calls from potential customers start and discovery of a new businesses first takes place.  This is particularly true in local search results where your presence and the quality of the …

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The Google Places Dashboard And Listing Ownership

The old Google Places for Business Dashboard allowed a listing to be verified into multiple accounts. The new Places for Business Dashboard only allows one verification per listing. This is a huge difference process. It is also an impediment to many listings being moved over to the new dashboard. Given the ambiguity of ownership in …

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Google Reviews – New Quirks

Last week, with the rollout of the Places Review Monitoring system, we started to see some quirks in review count difference between the monitoring dashboard and the + Page. Subsequently business owners, like Barbara Oliver, reported review count declines on their + Page and in the main search results. Barbara’s reviews went from 65 to …

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Google MapMaker Update Summary: One Database to Rule Them All

Now that MapMaker is back online, I wanted to understand the recent changes to MapMaker in the bigger context, how the changes related to the Places for Business Dashboard, the G+ Pages for Local and when it still makes sense to use MapMaker. I asked Dan Austin to write up his understanding of the changes from …

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Google MapMaker Back Online – What has changed?

Google MapMaker is back on line after having been down for several days. What has changed? Commenter George noted that that it is once again showing SABs hidden addresses. Probably a bug. The other obvious change is that it no longer is accepting custom categories. What else have you noticed? Here is the post that …

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Google Intros the Mother of All SMB Review Monitoring Systems

Google has announced on the Google and Your Business blog today that they have rolled out what appears to be the mother of all review monitoring systems today. The system, a new module for the updated Places for Business Dashboard, not only shows Google based reviews to dashboard owners and managers, it shows every review …

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Google MapMaker Going Offline for Upgrades

This was posted in the MapMaker (thanks to TC Treebles for the heads up) forums this afternoon. It is highly unusual for Google to take a product offline, even if temporarily, ever. The idea of getting rid of whacked out bots and having a single, authoritative single repository for all location data is significant. Planned Map …

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Google, Google Plus, Dog Food & Politics

A reader pointed out to me that Google themselves do not seem to think that local Google + Pages for Business are all that important as they have not upgraded their page to social. They in fact have not even claimed the page as of yet. Certainly no consumption of their own dog food there. …

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