Mike Blumenthal

In June of this past year, as Google My Business Website reached the age of one, I noted that businesses had created 2 million of these single page mobile ready websites. The rate of uptake, particularly in Asia and Brazil, has accelerated and there are now almost 12 million of these sites world wide. 10 …

When I helped start GatherUp (previously GetFiveStars), I did so with the idea that local businesses, small and big, deserved world class tools that helped them navigate and benefit from the world of reviews. And I also wanted to be sure that the agencies that helped them could leverage the more advanced features of these …

Google has been expanding the branded local search results. Most recently (last November timeframe) they added an About tab that included corporate information, often a link to wikipedia or the main corporate about us page and social links Today I started seeing the inclusion of a Posts Tab in these results. Interestingly this is NOT …

Tim Capper pointed out a few weeks ago How Google Exploits the Hospitality Industry for Profit.  Bed and Breakfasts are effectively treated as hotels on Google so they have to put up with all of that and then some. Growing up my father raised dogs. When there was a new litter, the runt was often …

I just saw this Google My Business Insight feature: Queries used to find your businessSend feedback. Per Google these are “The most popular queries for your business by unique users” I have been on a trip for the past week and less than observant of Insights so this could have shown up at any point …

Google has confirmed that anonymous reviews have in fact been removed from public view. Their statement to me: “We do not allow anonymous reviews today and we’ve removed legacy anonymous reviews.” If you recall, on May 24th, I reported their disappearance with the article Google Stops Counting Anonymous Reviews?. Given the obvious angst that many small …

From GetFiveStars, a new post about two business that are suing because of reviews (always a fascinating topic to me):  Reviews & Lawsuits – You Can Win for Losing and You Can Lose for Winning        From LocalU, my weekly conversation with Mary Bowling: Important Links from Last Week in Local – June 11 From …

Yesterday, Sergey Alakov and SearchEngineRountable reported a new siting in the Local Knowledge Panel: See What’s in Store. Today, Google has announced on Inside AdWords that as part if its new inventory feed program, See What’s in Store will be a free feature. From the Adwords Blog post: Onboarding to both local catalog ads and …

To paraphrase David Letterman, Google My Business Guidelines are like traffic signals to New Yorkers… just a rough suggestion. Google clearly states in the guidelines that “your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers. Accurately representing your business name helps customers find …

The search “restaurants in Mountain View” seems to be returning interesting test of late. Yesterday we saw a feature snippet, schema driven list replace the local pack. In this test we Interesting Finds supplement the pack. These were first spotted by Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineRountable in early April in the context of a Mother’s day …