Mike Blumenthal

Much has been written about what Google left out in the Places upgrade and much speculation has been offered as to the reasons for the change. The specualtion have often made the assumption that the new design was a reactive response on the part of Google. After looking at a large number of pages, I …

There have been two updates to the Places Quality Guidelines over the past two weeks. On July 21st, with the rollout of the new Places Page look, Google added this paragraph (bold added by me): You cannot create Places listings for stores which you do not own, but which stock your products. Instead, consider asking …

Historically it has been true that major updates to Google Places have been preceeded by more annoying and obvious bugs than normal being highlighted in the forums and elsewhere. In the case of the recent update that occurred on July 21st, there were a number of these bugs noted in the forums starting in early …

This morning I spoke of the Google Hotel experiment that made search results into interactive local content. It is not clear if this is the new normal or a test but on this search for bed and breakfast St. Augustine and every hotel search, Adwords with Location Extensions and Adwords Express are now showing as interactive local content on …

Last week amidst the noise of changes in the Place’s layout, Google noted  that  they would be “Integrating some of the great information that’s been buried on Place pages into your web search experience across all Google platforms“.  While Google doesn’t talk much about their thinking or the future, when they do, I have learned that you …

I recently had that pleasure of being interviewed by John Carcutt and Ross Dun on Webmasterradio.fm’s SEO 101 show, a show that gives out helpful information for the beginners without overwhelming them with technical details. The conversation covered a wide range of topics around Google Places. For those of you that would rather listen than …

Last week Google Places updated the display of the Places Page. In doing so they removed the review summaries, review snippets and 3rd party citations from the page. They removed a number of other fields from the Places display as well. Quite a few readers have asked where this field or that field has gone …

Here is the email that Google sent to all Boost advertisers today: Google Boost is now AdWords Express Dear Google Boost user,Thank you for choosing Boost to advertise your business online. Today, we’re renaming the product as AdWords Express and officially launching it across the U.S. This name change will not affect your account – your AdWords …

When working in Places the message that we all dread to hear: We do currently do not support the location is a Google message that instills the fear of god in the most expert of us. In normal situations it will show when a newly created listing has not yet been integrated in the Maps index. …