Mike Blumenthal

Update 4/26: It appears that all of the CityVoter.com reviews have been removed from Google. It is a little hard for me to understand how these reviews can be removed so quickly from Maps but can not be updated with equal speed. Reviews from Cityvoter.com are heavily referenced in Google Maps with over 1,113,968 instances. …

Over the past few days there has been a steep increase of reports of legitimately claimed LBC listings being hijacked in Google Maps. The reports (here, here, here & here) all follow the hijacking pattern that Locksmiths widely suffered during the second half of last year. The last of these recent reports, Hotel Hijacking Map Spam …

Why is Merchant Circle buying up thousands of trade name + locale domains? Over the weekend Nick Reese contacted me to explore what appeared to him, and to me, very unusual domain activity by Merchant Circle. It appears that Merchant Circle has purchased as many as 10,700 domains. These domain purchases have been going on …

Compete.com showed Google Maps overtaking Mapquest in visitors in January as did Comscore. At the time Hitwise showed that Maps as nearly passing Mapquest but dropping back. As recently as last week Hitwise indicated that Mapquest was still in the lead but that gap was closing. Heather Hopkins of Hitwise took a fresh look at …

Yesterday, Google Maps rolled out a new Local Business Center User Guide. The guide has more specific details about the listing process, the meaning of various messages and an improved interface to the information. The LBC User Guide is a definite improvement over the previous help system and may ameliorate some of the business listing …

Update 4/13: Google Maps now in lead over Mapquest, according to Hitwise Compete.com has shown Google Maps as having more traffic than Mapquest since January. Hitwise on the other hand has Google Maps gaining but not yet surpassing Mapquest. Here are the latest numbers from Hitwise: Both Hitwise and Compete show an uptick in March …

Analytics is not something that I specialize in but given the increasingly high profile nature of the Local 10 Pack and no easy solution from Google for distinguishing this traffic, I turned to Martijn Beijk for advice. Martijn Beijk works as a SEO at Onetomarket, one of the leading online marketing agencies in Europe with offices …

According to Compete.com , Google Maps continued to gain market share in the maps market as it grew somewhat faster clip during the past month. Both Google Maps and Mapquest saw increases in visitation, however, Google Maps grew at 13.5% rate over the previous month compared to Mapquest’s 10.8% growth.

Review spam in Google Maps has been a problem since reviews started being accepted by Google. There has always been a link to tag the review as inappropriate but no clear indication of what was and what was not acceptable nor when or how a review would be removed. Google has at least dealt with …