Mike Blumenthal

Joy Hawkins reports that Adword customers that are using Location extension that are synced with GMB are now showing their review stars in the Ads. Previously this feature was only available via Adwords Express and to get the stars you needed to work with a 3rd party review site like TrustPilot. I first saw these …

Re/code has just reported that Uber has hired Brian McClendon, the former co-head of Google Maps. McClendon has a storied history in the mapping world having created Keyhole and Google Earth and having marshalled many of the technical developments at Google Maps over the past 10 years. According to Wikipedia he holds 12 Map patents including …

Re/Code reported yesterday that Facebook is expanding its Place Tips program and  making free beacons available to retailers. The program, first tested in Brooklyn 6 months ago, installs a beacon into the local business and pushes current posts and photos for the business to your phone while you are in that location. If you are standing in line at a …

Google Photos, positioned by Google as a GMail for photos, is an incredible product. Incredibly amazing, incredibly scary. It does well what Google does well. Update: If you are interested in learning more about the technology behind Photos and what it is capable of read this article: How Google’s New Photos App Can Tell Cats From …

Update: Google has posted at the forum with an explanation.  Update: Google has added that it is not necessary to do a “null edit” just be logged into GMB.  First reported by Integrated Marketing, Google is now requiring that US accounts periodically go to a given listing and do a null edit to prove that it …

Starting late last week we saw weirdnesses in using the location setting option in Google organic search. Initially it was throwing off errors that it could not recognize cities like New York and Chicago. That error disappeared and you could change the location. However weird results started cropping up with the local pack results reflecting the …

Last week Andrew Shotland noted some traffic declines for a number of local directories that he associated with the Door Way Page Algo update. In that post, Phl Rozak  of LocalVisibility noted in the comments to that post that he had simultaneously seen an increase in pack results not just for real estate but for other …

Once again, local results for real estate and realtors are back in the Google search results. Google Local Real estate results have had a tortured relationship in the Google search results. Having most recently gone MIA at the time of the Pigeon update.  I noted in November 2012: In 2009 Google rolled out an expanded real …

Google has recently removed links from the Local Knowledge Panel in search to the Google Plus Local Page. Nicolai Helling now reports that the last links standing in Google Maps, to read and or write reviews on the G+ Page for Local, have now been redirected as well. The read reviews link now redirects to the Review …

Recently Google+ posts stopped showing up in the knowledge panel and Twitter content started showing up in real time in Google mobile searches. The only value to an SMB of using Plus and the only reason I recommended it was that it put messaging and an image on the front page of Google search. That post conveyed …