Mike Blumenthal

Google’s crowd sourced map building and listing has succeeded on a number of fronts at allowing maps and listings to be updated at a pace that no one else in the industry can keep up. While the mapping side has little economic incentive for cheating, the listing side is prime for self serving activities. For …

tl;dr: Lots of small updates last week. And soon, very soon I won’t be pulling my hair out. 🙂 The transition to the new dashboard status: Judging by the fact that there were lots of complaints over the past two weeks in the forums about THE EMAIL and that my crufty, 2007 dashboard was finally converted …

Engaging with G+ can seem like a chore to most SMBs who have trouble attracting their local clients to their Plus page. Its main advantage is that Google has integrated it with search, where folks are in fact looking. Google seems to have recently upped the ante in local providing one more reason for the …

With the advent of the knowledge graph and the info panel, Google has provided local businesses a lot of territory above the fold. This is true in both the main search results and the area to right of the search results where ads often show. Kerry Fager of Findlaw.com shared this screen shot (IE) that …

Google is apparently testing a new, cleaner front page layout that will affect both local and regular search results. First reported by Dan Barker on March 5th, Searchnewz is reporting that they will be rolled out.  I am now seeing this new layout on Safari for Mac. The differences: The removal of the underlines from …

Over the past few weeks, Google has been moving a large number of listings from the old dashboard to the new one. Often these dashboards held listings that were claimed into more than one account or had been claimed in multiple ways. When there was a conflict in either scenario Google sent out an alerting …

As you know I have been a fierce critic of the bad local results that came out of the Hummingbird update. Search terms that should have returned lists of local businesses would often return a branded one box that often would be complete spam. When it was critical for a client, I reported the bad …

Update Friday 2/21 7:30 PM: Some comments that Google has noted that we care share about the Canadian Places Warning: The February 21 deadline only applies to users to whom Google has sent emails. If a user sees the message in the dashboard (but no email), deep breaths. It will be okay. There is no …

With the rollout of the new Google Guidelines and the @maptavists exploits, there has been a very lively discussion about Google and whether they are active enough in removing spam and in creating an even playing field. Dan Austin made the point with this comment. Please read his comment below prior to taking the poll. …