Mike Blumenthal

Last week when Google Map’s new Place’s pages were introduced it was noted that they were not going to be indexed (there is a great discussion going on at Greg’s blog now) leaving the impression amongst many that they would sit, isolated, in the Maps siloh. They would, it was thought, only be seen to …

Google Maps is rolling out a new UI upgrade, the “Places” page, worldwide to replace the tabbed interface text view in Maps. The rollout, beginning today, will take place over the next week. The new interface provides a single page where all information about a “Place” is visible in well, one place. Google has taken …

One of the less than ideal aspects of Google showing Local Universal results is the display of an Authoritative OneBox for a broad local search like “Las Vegas Computer Repair“. However,since mid August, there have been a number of reports (here, here, here, here) in both the forums and in communications from Local Search Marketers Dev …

Google Maps and the Local Business Center have been hell for hospitals. Virtually everything that could go wrong with Maps has gone wrong when it comes to hospitals getting their many listings correct in the LBC and the Maps index with the technical issues compounded by the lack of customer support. This has been an …

Google Maps Local Business Center has a few quirks. One of those is how it handles names with two capital letters. Businesses sometimes spend millions projecting their names and are meticulous about how they appear in any media. It must be discouraging to firms like McAdams Floral in Victoria, TX and McDonald’s that Google Maps does not …

I am fascinated by the intersection of Local and our every day lives. The Internet has moved from the era of local questions and world wide answers to the era of local answers to world wide queries. Google Maps, because of its immense reach, is at the center of this confluence. Real people with real …

As David Mihm pointed out in his recent Search Engine Land article summarizing some of the issues with local categories, there has been a lot of discussion about categorization in Google Maps. A number of suggestions for ways that Google might facilitate SMB interaction with the Local Business Center were offered. In addition to penalties …

Ahmed Farooq alerted me to a new featurette of Google UK, a collection of the latest Internet stats. The page offers up a series of factoids gleaned from a number of resources in a “range of topics from macroscopic economic and media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time”. For example …

My wife’s business, whose business data was not widely distributed across the internet or offline but is in the Local Business Center, has received the following offer in a direct mail piece from Google: The offer, which drops to $75 after September 30 and expires on November 30th, offers this 6 Step program for her …

I will be speaking again this year at SMX East on the panel: Ranking Tactics For Local Search. Chaired by Greg Sterling, I will be joining a veritable who’s who in Local. The other speakers are (arranged alphabetically): Mary Bowling David Mihm Will Scott Andrew Shotland Please let me know if you will be there, …