LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Last week saw the launch of Google Place Pages which Google described as “a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it.” Nothing like a modest goal to scare the crap out of everybody else in local search.
According to Greg Sterling Google was not going to be indexing Place [...]

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Update: MyMapInfo, the SEO who was working on Artie’s site, commented on Will’s post that I had mistaken him for a spammer when he has been trying to get his client to rank well after the client was the victim of map spammers.  I’ll take him at his word and apologize for impugning his reputation [...]

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In the previous post, where I stumbled on to ads on a Google Map on Merchant Circle, “Mappin’” Mike Blumenthal took me to the local search woodshed with the following comment:
In mid March, Google announced that they have changed the API to allow the hosting site show ads along with searches for local businesses performed [...]

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I was just looking at this page on Merchant Circle and noticed ads showing up on their Google Map!

I am sensing a trend.

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Well not quite every search, but as Mike Blumenthal just told me, the 10 Pack is now appearing in a number of broad, non-geo phrase searches.
Some observations of the 10 pack’s behavior in Web results (the “Web Pack” anyone?):

In every query I have tried the 10 pack appears in position #4.  It still gets pushed [...]

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thanks to Matt McGee for tipping me off to this one.  Here’s a particularly useful example:

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When Best of the Web Local launched in August, I thought it was yet another wakeup call to Yellow Pages companies (both print and IYPs) that their business was under attack.  There are already thousands of IYP type sites out there, but when an established domain like BOTW.org launches one and combines that with the [...]

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Google Maps is on the verge of creating an international incident.  I did the following search on Google:
“pizza 94566″
I got the 10 pack.  Check out the URL for “New York Pizza”

If I had wanted a “Damn Tasty!” za from Amstelveen I would have asked for one Google.
I highly recommend checking out the site.  I personally [...]

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Matt McGee just posted that Google Local Business Referrals is shutting down.  GLBR paid people to sign up small businesses to Adwords and Google Local Business Center.  According to Matt:
In a previous post on this blog, I speculated that the program would fail because it didn’t guarantee enough money to the foot soldiers, that many [...]

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…as there is always the chance that the algorithms won’t go your way.  As always Mike Blumenthal’s blog has surfaced another story of an unfortunate business owner that is being hurt by Google Local Business Center’s peculiarities.
Here’s where you need to go if you are looking for a man with a van in London.

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I downloaded Yellowpages.com’s iPhone App this weekend and was psyched to give it a test run after hearing Frank Jules speak about it at Kelsey DMS last week.  The executive summary: not bad but needs work.
It does its main function of allowing you to search for businesses fine.  And this may almost be enough - [...]

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There’s a minor commotion going on in the comments section of my popular post on how to update your yellow pages listings for free.   One of my readers has been talking to Localeze about their service to bulk update businesses with thousands of locations across a large number of local search sites, and wondering [...]

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1. Looking for the number for Microsoft’s Mountain View office
2. Searched “microsoft mountain view ca” in Google.  They had the wrong number.
3. Searched “microsoft mountain view ca” in Yahoo.  They had the wrong number.
4. Searched “microsoft mountain view ca” in maps.live.com (MSN).  They had the wrong number!
5. Went to Microsoft.com, entered “mountain view, ca” in [...]

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Check out the above local result for “flooring phoenix, az”.  Why is www.bakerbrosdeli.com showing up as the URL for Baker Bros Area Rugs & Flooring?  This is likely just a simple case of an algorithmic mismatch, but given how easy it is to edit the business listings in Google Maps, it also could be a [...]

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