Mike Blumenthal

Google has made a minor update to their guideline update disallowing a listing for an ongoing service, class, or meeting: Last Week’s Update This Week’s Update You also can’t create a Places listing for an ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don’t own or have the authority to represent. Please coordinate …

I found this post in the Google Places forum of interest. I hear many stories in the Local SEO world of half truths being used to confuse or obfuscate what is being done. What is your take in this case? ************************************ Can ezlocal delete my places page when I stop using their services even though …

Thursday’s announcement that Google Places would autmatically update Places data more quickly if Google thought they had more trusted information generated a fair bit of dismay. The words used to describe Google’s action, while occassionaly positive in nature, generally reflected fear and anger: Unnecessary, Bugs me Headache, Impending doom REALLY CONCERNS ME BACK ASSWORDS!!!!, STUPID!!!! STUPID!!!! STUPID!!!! Clusterf***, Very …

I speculated that Siri, or something similar, would become the norm for interfacing with smart phones and in doing so it would define the future of local search (and everything else). Well it seems to have succeeded on the everything front but just not on the local search front. The Siri natural language interface is …

Yesterday Google Places announced on the LatLong Blog that they would automatically update claimed listings more quickly with information from trusted third parties and end users if Google thought the information was more accurate than information that was in the Places Dashboard. They noted: But now, if a user provides new information about a business …

As part of the changes to Google Places that took place in early August, Google’s Jeol Headley noted on Google + (in response to a question by Linda Buquet) that an update to a business’s description could take a long time. It appears possible that the alternate phone number field is under the same regime. …

Did you know that the Google category synonym “all you can eat” is associated with Chinese & Japanese restaurants in the US but only with Japanese restaurants in Australia? That and other amazing facts can be gleaned from a recent upgrade adding international categories to our Google Places Category Tool We have finally added categories …

I just received this email from Netflix. Hmm… lets change, piss everyone off and back off… Dear Michael, It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs. This means no change: one …

Nyagoslav of Optilocal was first to highlight this recent Google Places Quality Guideline update: You also can’t create a Places listing for an ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don’t own or have the authority to represent. Please coordinate with your host to have your information displayed on their Place page …