Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Category Archive For "Google Places (Maps & Local)"
Google Maps: Widespread Hijacking of Business Listings Confirmed
Late last week, the widespread highjacking of business listings in the florist industry for the purpose of affiliate mapspam was reported, confirmed and documented. There had been rumors for several months in the groups of these hijackings but specifics had been difficult to come by. According to the Real Florists Blog by FlowerChat Blog the …
Google Maps announces Quality Guidelines & Reinclusion Option
Today Google Maps has introduced quality guidelines for business listings in the Google Maps. Google has also now provided a reinclusion option. Both are available via the Google Maps Help Center. Quality Guidelines: The following items outline practices that could result in your business listings being permanently removed from Google Maps. While they cover the …
Can You Spell Restuarant?
One of the struggles of researching local marketing is the fact that I frequently misspell the word Restaurant. I am obviously not the only one. I searched today for Pittsburgh Pa Restuarants to find this Authoritative OneBox: The record has not been claimed by the business owner as of yet but it made me curious how …
Will Ubiquity change the way we use Local
Mozilla Labs introduced Ubiquity today. What is Ubiquity? Not really sure but it seems to be/do the following: -It is a natural language command interface for Firefox. -Words invoke commands that interact with API’s and social networks -A cool way to create mashups on the fly that communicate your intent -A new way to interact …
(The original) Local Links of Interest
U.S. on Track to Top Mobile Net Market, Study Says – Steve McClellan, AdWeek.com Why the change? Kerr cites several reasons, including the fact that U.S. mobile carriers are rapidly building out 3G networks, which facilitate the transmission of mobile Web-based video at faster rates, something that U.K. and other European-based carriers did years ago. …
Local Links of Interest
Location-based services now hotter than hot? – Martijn Beijk,  martijnbeijk.com Location-based services are hot. Now hotter than before. Because Google just launched their Geolocation API. What does this mean in general for software or services we are going to see? Well imagine opening up your browser or software application on your mobile phone or laptop and do a search …
Urbanspoon on the iPhone Heatmap
Urbanspoon’s iPhone application is a fun, engaging app that uses the features of the iPhone and location awareness to create a unique local discovery experience. They are now showing a heatmap (thanks to High Earth Orbit) showing where the shakes have been taking place for the last 24 hours: According to Urbanspoon: 6,000,000 shakes 300,000 …
Comparing the Local Onebox with the Maps business directory: an architectural view
This guest article is written by Erek Dyskant, a database analyst, who has written a number of apps that interface with Google Maps and Yahoo Local. It provides an interesting look at the inner workings of the Google Maps database. As I’ve been reading about some of the discrepancies between the Google Maps business directory …
Google Mapspam – a violated Public Trust?
Update 8:00 am EDT 8/24/08: As of this morning Google seems to have pulled the main page OneBox results noted below but the deceptive listings still appear in Maps. The search phrase local STD testing, Tulsa is still returning a Local Onebox. Update 8/25/08 10:00 am EDT: Google has stopped showing local results on the …
Local Links of Interest
IYP Reach in the US (according to Google) – Amed Farooq, TechSoapbox.com A quick, but informative, look at the relative importance of stand alone IYP domains using Google’s Ad Planner. TomTom’s Mobile Network Strategy – Mike Dobson, Telemapics.com Last time we were speculating on how TomTom (and TeleAtlas) might deploy technology that would allow them to collect …
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