Places Blackhat Playground – Reported To Be Closed

It seems that the newest blackhat playground of user generated input annoyance is the “Place is permanently closed” radio button in Google Places. I have been receiving an increasing number of complaints from readers that are seeing the flag. In fact Barbara Oliver Jewelry and Andrews Jewelers both experienced the dreaded yellow highlight on their Places …

Continue reading

hReview Testimonials from SMB Sites Starting to Show in Places

Since last October when Google noted in their FAQ that Rich Snippet testimonials might flow into a Place Page, many webmasters took the time to mark up their client’s sites in hReview. As Andrew Shotland has recently noted and my observations have confirmed, these marked up reviews have slowly been making their way onto Places …

Continue reading

Testimonials as Reviews – A View from the Field

Last week after publication of the new Google Rich Snippets for Local FAQ and follow up comments by Carter Maslan, there was a great deal of discussion about what was best practice vis a vis testimonials on a SMB web site. Clearly, when you focus on the client, having this type of content can be …

Continue reading

Google My Business Photos 3.0 Launches

Google has significantly upgraded the interface and functionality of the photos section within the My Business Dashboard. The new interface replaces the arbitrary categories with tags and allows for a simpler interface for the cover photo, the profile photo and a business’s logo.  Although there is no ability to add custom tags, it is a …

Continue reading

Yelp Review Summaries Back in the Google Knowledge Panel

I am not sure whether this message has been approved by Jeremy Stoppleman but at least for now, with the new reviews from the web announced yesterday summaries now showing in the Knowledge Panel, Yelp is back. For those of you that don’t go back to the “early” days of Google Local, it would seem …

Continue reading

Negative Review – How Would You Respond?

Negative reviews are the one of the hardest issues that SMBs have to confront. Learning how to respond to them effectively is best learned by sharing amongst ourselves and with these same SMBs. So I wanted to try some participatory blogging to tap the collective consciousness about what makes for a good response to a …

Continue reading

Last Links from Google Maps to G+ Local Plus Pages Removed

Google has recently removed links from the Local Knowledge Panel in search to the Google Plus Local Page. Nicolai Helling now reports that the last links standing in Google Maps, to read and or write reviews on the G+ Page for Local, have now been redirected as well. The read reviews link now redirects to the Review …

Continue reading

Some Thoughts On the New Pak Results from Google

Some thoughts & observations on the new [Hamburger] Pak from Google which for now, like the Carousel, is US only. 1-The local carousel is still in use and shows when you select a result delivered by “People also search for” in a 7-pack result. Will we soon see its demise as well? Currently Google shows …

Continue reading