Mike Blumenthal

Over the weekend I reworked Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry’s publisher & authorship Rich Snippets. Previously I had only had the rel=author snippet on the home page but based on other examples that were showing in Local I added the rel=publisher rich snippet to the home page only and left the rel=author snippet on the home …

David has just created an update to the great chart describing the mishegas that is the Local Search ecosystem. The chart elegantly captures the flow of data from the top tier data suppliers through the directories and into Google and the other search engines. The complete set of charts detailing the relations can be found at A …

The PlusBox is now once again being seen more widely in the search results. When Google strated manipulating local search results by reducing their footprint and removing the description several weeks ago, the PlusBox feature appeared with increasing frequency. I have received a number of emails alerting me to the “new feature” so I assume …

Does the Google Places “Report a Problem” Work to Remove Spam? In the past reporting, spam via this mechanism has been roughly akin to peeing in the ocean… satisfying but hardly ever changing the salinity let alone warming the ocean around your feet. I am curious whether, along with other improvements in service level, “Report …

Over the past two days a raft of posters noted in the forums that their listings were now showing the dreaded “We Currently Do Support This Location”. For most of these listings the fix of “poking the listing” with an edit/submit in the dashboard did not return the listing to the index. Google posted this …

Obviously lots is happening both behind the scenes and in front of them in Places. The weird problems of dupes, locations not supported, bugs etc etc have skyrocketed in the forums, usually a foreshadowing of substantial changes. And it seems that the missing Places description noted first by Mathew Hunt yesterday is the new normal at …

Mathew Hunt  of Small Business Coach pointed out that, starting last night, the meta description snippet associated with Blended results is missing in action. They came and went in my results this morning and are now gone again. Obviously things are flakey and who knows where they will end up. I have also obesrved the …

In Australia, Google uses the Australian Yellow Pages as the exclusive primary data source for Places and it is so noted on every page of business listings in the Maps results. Yet this story from the forums of being able to buy your way into a multitude of Places listings by purchasing locations with the …

Having first struggled with rick snippet markup for reviews and having recently struggled with implementing rel=”author” markup on several sites I was pleased to see AJ Kohn’s new Rich Snippets Testing Tool Bookmarklet. With the tool I was able to check several sites very quickly, find minor problems and get the rel=”author” tag working properly. It …

We’re up, we’re down. We’re not sure where we are. Reader & TC Jim Jaggers alerted me to the fact that Google has changed the  Google Places PO Box guidelines once again. In this new reading PO Boxes are definitely out. Suite numbers and box numbers are in. The new prohibition against moving the pin …