Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Category Archive For "Google Places (Maps & Local)"
Google on Reviews: Asking for them is OK, Soliciting them is BAD
What is the difference between asking for reviews and soliciting them? It seems that a number of SMBS have discovered that one leads to jail time. Google has been throwing out reviews left and right of late. This is not a bug but the outcome of a newly aggressive review spam filter. The forums were …
Google Testing Lead Generation System for New Car Sales
For the past month and half Google has been testing a new local car lead generation product in the San Francisco market. The product, officially called Google Comparison Ads for Autos, allows a consumer to anonymously request quotes on specific in stock inventory from dealers within a certain distance of their search. According to Brian …
Google+ Business Pages: To Merge Or Not to Merge, That is the Question
The recent rollout of the ability to merge a G+ Business page and a G+ Local page was a significant sign post on Google’s way to integrating local into social. To Google’s credit the product and process were simple and elegant. The design was more than a notch above previous efforts in local and it …
Are Rich Snippet Reviews Making a Limited Comeback in Local?
I am once again seeing semantically marked up pages shown with review stars in the search results . However the frequency of their display is very limited compared to earlier in the year. Summary review stars from the home page, which were wildly abused, are not visible but review stars are visible on this testimonial …
Is Google Thinking About Abandoning the Zagat Rating System?
Matt Gregory, a local SEO in Minneapolis, recently sent me these screen shots of an obvious test that Google is conducting to assess the relative merit of stars vs. the Zagat display for reviews in the main SERPS. He has been seeing these results on Safari for the Mac consistently from Monday evening through today …
What Should You Tell A Client When Google Loses Their Reviews – A 4 Part Plan
With the recent surge of complaints about “lost” reviews in the forums, Google acknowledging that there were a number of reasons that a review might be tagged as spam and that the car industry in particular was being scrutinized, I thought it might make sense to rerun this May article about coping with lost reviews. …
Step by Step Guide to the Google+ Business/Local Merge Verification Process
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 Updated Saturday, Aug 4th. If you already have a Google+ Business page (or create one) then you can now …
Keywords Not Provided Passes the 60% Mark
If there is still any doubt that keyword detail will completely disappear at some point in the very near future my monthly analytics should dispel it. The analytics for my blog indicate that over 60% of the keywords are no longer provided. While my blog has a more technical readership than many sites and the …
New Local Search Result Display – Google Upgrades the Plus Box
Joy Hawkins has spotted a new type of local display showing for the search Flushing Auto Insurance where additional results are pinned but NOT numbered. Joy hypothesized that the result is a function of rich snippet formatting of the address being on the website. That however does not appear to be the case as neither …
Google+ Local And Review Issues
Since the rollout of Google+ Local the complaints about missing reviews have risen dramatically in the forums. The issues that Google have had right along with losing reviews remain much the same and reviews can go missing for many of the same reasons: – Marked as spam – They are misplaced by Google briefly or …
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