LOC@L SEO GUIDE

A frustrated practitioner of bail bonds SEO laments about Google Places, Where Crooked Businesses Take Over: “Here’s another great example of the wonder of Google Places and Google’s dealings with Local Search. Type in Google, “Santa Clarita Bail Bonds.” (this example could be done for many other keywords if you care to try) You will see [...]

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The NY Times reports on the epidemic of open businesses that are reported as “closed” in Google Places and name checks Linda Buquet and Mike Blumenthal, who successfully changed the Googleplex’s Place Page status to “closed” a few weeks ago (SEO Badass award goes to you Mike). Howard Lerman, CEO of Yext, sees an opportunity [...]

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I haven’t pontificated on last week’s changes that removed most of the third party data from displaying on Google Place Pages – I basically agree with David Mihm’s assessment of the situation – this is an interface update, not an algorithm update. This article by FT.com implies that Google removed 3rd party reviews from Place [...]

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Phil Rozek has a great post on The 1st Annual Google Places Freakshow: “Whatever your ranking, I suggest you pay attention to how your Google listing comes across at a gut level.  Ask friends, family, or customers who haven’t seen it to take a look and give you their first impressions.  You’ll ensure that YOUR [...]

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Nyagoslav Zhekov has been adding some thoughtful comments to the blog as of late and I thought this post on his take on the Local Search Ranking Factors was worth a read.

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I just wanted to use “radii” in a headline… Mike Blumenthal tweeted yesterdat that he thought the radii of the Google map for various local queries had gotten smaller. To me it seemed like the radii hadn’t changed much but the map pins had gotten bigger so I decided to compare the map that displayed [...]

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Mike Blumenthal has some concerns re Google Places’ new user review feeds: When was the last time you heard a reviewer ask for an RSS feed of their reviews? Well maybe some reviewer some place did… but then I suggest you follow Google’s instructions and go find it. Instead of attaching it to the obvious place in [...]

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From a patent application Google filed in September 2010 entitled SCORING LOCAL SEARCH RESULTS BASED ON LOCATION PROMINENCE [0047] When the document falls within the broad area (block 460–YES), then a location prominence score associated with the document may be determined (block 470). The location prominence score may be based on a set of factors [...]

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Greg Linden uncovers a potential new Google Maps ranking signal: direction requests: …certain very large search engines have massive logs of people asking for directions from A to B, hundreds of millions of people and billions of A to B queries. And, it appears this data may be as or more useful than user reviews [...]

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Lior Ron announced today that Google is dumping the HotPot brand for its local reviews system and rolling it into Google Places. It’s a good move and I am guessing an indicator of more product coherence from GOOG as a result of Larry Page becoming CEO. I was always confused by the HotPot brand. Most, [...]

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