Loci 2008: David Mihm’s Significant Local Posts of 2008

David Mihm, a web designer and search marketing practitioner from Portland, writes for Searchenginland and has his own blog, Mihmorandum, that focuses on local search. David, for me,  epitimomizes the ideal of learning through cooperation and collaboration. He created the well received Local Search Ranking Factors project and was a key contributor on the research …

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Loci 2008: Matt Cutt’s Important Local Articles of 2008

Matt Cutts from Google is well….Matt Cutts. He doesn’t need much introduction (nor link juice) from me 🙂 . **** Here you go: Just to reiterate, this is my personal opinion. I would say that in my mind, one main story of Google Maps/Local this year is how it opened up more this year. Overall, …

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Loci 2008: Important Articles in Local Search

1. Particular postions, points or places 2. Centers of activity, attention, or concentration Loci 2008 is a year end review of articles in Local Search that will be appearing over the next week(s). For me, collaboration, cooperation, review and research create the path to increase our understanding of the world. That is even more true …

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Google Not Liable in Adwords Case – What does it mean to Local?

Barry Schawrtz reported out in SearcheEngineLand about a recent Court decision that held that Google Is Not Liable For Bad Products Sold Through AdWords. Here is a more detailed summary of the case from MediaPost:  A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Google for allegedly displaying fraudulent ringtone ads. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel in …

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Most Read Posts of 2008

Most Read New Articles in 2008 Here are the 10 articles (who picked 10 as the appropriate number, anyways?) written in 2008  that received the most readership during the past year. Readership and traffic have moved up significantly compared to last year, growing along with the broader interest in Local. My Top 10 most read stories of …

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TomTom rolls out new mapping product, announces 5 millionth user edit

TomTom, owner of TeleAtlas, has rolled out a new web based (beta) mapping product and announced their 5 millionth user generated edit of the their map data. What does this mean long haul for Google? Google’s growth over they years has been typically predicated on leveraging internal technology acquired through development (i.e. search) or purchase …

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SMB PPC Ad Spend Drop

Noa Gertin of Palore has recently completed some interesting research on SMB PPC ad spends. They looked at over 3000 SMBs who advertise online, on different websites, out of which they focused on 300 businesses who also advertised on search engines in the past 5 months. They filtered out nationwide chains and all SMBs with more than …

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Maps in times of trouble

Internet usage in general, goes up during disasters. A large number of internet searches quickly follow catastrophes and major world events. Google, for example, reported that searches for news-related sites increased 60 times over normal levels on September 11. The London bombings in July 2005 showed a similar search peak according to the Google Zeitgeist …

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