Do Positive Reviews Motivate Consumers?

It seems intuitive that a negative review corpus would severely limit a business’s online opportunities. And likewise that a positive review  corpus would expand them. But these recent surveys indicate that a negative collection of reviews is much more likely to harm a business than positive reviews are going to help them. In an effort to …

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Can Facebook Crack the SMB Nut? Can Google?

Greg did an interesting article on Facebook’s move into the SMB market. Whether their decision to forgo resellers is the correct one, time will tell. But has Greg points out, the real question is whether they can deliver compelling value to SMBs, in an easy to use package that drives widespread adoption. Many have dreamed …

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Google Pre-Announces Plus Features for Bulk

Alert reader Nico has  pointed out that Google has publicly committed to the rollout of Plus features for bulk upload users on their Help Pages. We’ve listened carefully to your feedback. In the future, you’ll be able to: Make updates and posts to your customers using the Google+ page for your location See Insights to …

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Google Announces Upgraded Schema Support

Today on the Google webmaster blog Google has announced upgraded Schema support for additional phone types and detailed specific recommendations for using Schema.org on location pages. It is unfortunate but Google did not include a new schema for call tracking. Obviously this granular detail is useful for achieving more accuracy in Knowledge Graph answer boxes. …

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Google Upgrades Bulk Upload Again

Update: Google has confirmed that the new bulk upload uses the same “one claim rule” as the new Places Dashboard and Plus. This means that once an account has been upgraded that the listings will not be able to be claimed into either Google Plus/Places Dashboard or another bulk account (at least not one that …

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Matt Cutts: Google Plus to Receive Manual Penalty

Google has in the past penalized it’s own properties five times for breaking its own SEO rules. Matt Cutts has apparently now also sanctioned Google Plus with a manual penalty. Here are the comments from the internal email that was forwarded to me: “Forks or no forks, we believe that the Plus team has overdone …

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Google Updates Bulk Feed

Posted from 20,000 ft on my iPhone so forgive any typos. Googler Jade, who seems to be everywhere these days doing everything, just posted these notes about an upgrade to the bulk tool: Importing a spreadsheet to the bulk upload tool is now improved. Now, when you import a file, you’ll see a preview of …

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