Mike Blumenthal

One option in the new Contact Us process that appears to be an improvement is elevating a form to contest reviews. The form, previously buried, has in the recent past sent a review removal request into the queued email response system and typically generated a human and intelligent response. This contrasts with the pissing in …

Google recently upgraded their site wide Help pages with a new material design them and more context sensitive help. Today they have also changed the Contact US option available for My Business listings to attempt to segment certain problems and direct users back to the Help files. Depending on the issue chosen, the user will either …

It is that time of year when I usually am beating a dead horse or three. With the arrival of my annual SuperPages Yellow Page Book(let?) I gleefully get out my ruler, Excel and last year’s book to see whether I can once again make fun of lament the decline of the one of Local’s …

Good News Bad News Update Monday, 9:00 am: Good: The Phone (and occasionally the chat) interface attached to the help link within the dashboard shows during business hours for support. Bad: It doesn’t appear to be working and you should continue to use the “old” way of clicking on the Contact Us link in the …

Dave Oremland sent me a Washington Post article last week detailing a case where small business owner Colleen Dermott of Dog Tranquility in Burke, VA was suing a client for $65,000. The client had left bad reviews on Yelp and Angie’s List. She claimed that the client,  Jennifer Ujimori, in leaving a bad review, had made …

Yext Power Listing tool has often been useful to me to find bad NAP. I would caution others though that it is primarily a selling tool not a diagnostic one. And one that seems to be manipulated to increase your sense of discomfort EVEN when there is improving NAP. By Yext’s measures 18 Listings improved, …

Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google (paywall – to get to it use this search result to get through)  is a look by the Wall Street Journal at the FTC staff report inadvertently released to them under a FOIA request. The staff findings “concluded that Google’s conduct has resulted—and will result—in real harm to consumers and to …

The Bold Italic is reporting on a film maker that is attempting to tell the Yelp is a bully story via a documentary. Yelp gets zero stars in an upcoming documentary by local filmmaker Kaylie Milliken. Her film, Billion Dollar Bully (which is halfway done, according to the International Business Times) focuses on complaints from restaurant owners about Yelp’s …

It has been confirmed that YellowPages.ca  (YP.ca) is no longer Google’s primary data supplier for business listings in Canada. But the story appears to be bigger than that and likely includes new terms in many countries whereby Google is now owning rather than licensing their business listing data. Google has, over the past year an …

Update 3/13 3:30 (our lucky day): Google has noted that hours are back to normal. Colan Nielsen of Imprezzio Marketing just noticed that Google has limited the hours of their phone support due to high call volumes: Our call centers have recently experienced high support volume and our GMB specialists are working hard to solve …