Mike Blumenthal

Gigaom reports that there is a new class action suit against Yelp for security law violations: The complaint alleges Yelp violated securities law by committing “fraud on the market,” and claims that executive sold stock when the price was near a high of almost $90 in February; the price fell sharply shortly after this in light of the negative …

Search modifiers, both those used by Google and those frequently used by searchers are interesting. In the case of the former, a change in how Google handled the phrase “near” led to some overstated numbers. In the case of the latter, I wondered whether any of them are effective proxies for measuring the increase in …

The recent Google Local Update (aka Pigeon) was very disruptive. Although as I wrote at the time and reiterate, only when we actually look at measurable results can we both understand its actual impact and perhaps understand more of what was happening and what changes Google has made. There were two main parts to the update …

Have you ever thought: I really want to spend tonight reading Mike’s back library but I just don’t know where to start? Phil Rozek thought you might and wanted to make your job easier. He pored through the 2400 articles I have written since day one, drove them through the absolute best local algo (Miriam Ellis, …

Googler Jade has announced in the forums that they are now going to allow instant verification via webmaster tools for many businesses. From the announcement: Good news — starting today, if you’re verifying a page for your business, you may be instantly verified on Google My Business if you’ve already verified your business’s website with …

With every update from Google we often get artifacts that are very annoying. With the Pigeon Local Update we have our share of Pigeon Poo. Barry Schwartz pointed out the inclusion of Expedia in the carousel. Stefano Romero, Mike Ehline, Casey Meraz and David Perez have all pointed out similar, equally bad examples of Pigeon Poo type …

Yelp has just released their June ending numbers. I wanted to lead with a realistic headline before the other pundits did. While profit has never been something that Yelp crows about there are some interesting numbers: Cumulative reviews grew 44% year over year to approximately 61 million and and approximately 40% of new reviews were …

MozCast has now updated their query set to better reflect what searchers are seeing. Even though their methodology was different than that of Whitespark, the new results showing a decline in 7-packs due to the Google Local algo update are much the same: a 23.4% drop. It is interesting to note that one of their observations which …