LOC@L SEO GUIDE

From Mike’s post today entitled Some Days Are Shittier Than Others: Someone uploaded pictures of poo on my business listing and I can’t get them off!!! Fortunately Google took notice and brought out the pooper scooper. Of course this probably only happened because Mike’s post brought it to GOOG’s attention which will likely leave a [...]

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I have been hearing reports from a variety of sources that over the past few days more rich snippets have started to show up in Google Places. Using rich snippets on your site to get your content into Place Pages has been a hit-or-miss affair – mostly miss.  At SMXWest, Google’s Carter Maslan told me [...]

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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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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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Hard to beat free wifi

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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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Reviews of businesses on Groupon have been spotted on Google Place Pages since January: Last year I speculated that social local applications like Twitter & Foursquare could start to cause a lot of SEO problems for IYPs because they could easily replicate the IYP structure while providing a lot more unique content. Groupon reviews are [...]

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From Danny Sullivan’s piece on Google’s latest “Farmer Update”: We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give [...]

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We’ve got rats. There I said it. I opened up the door to my furnace and found a scattering of crusty little rat droppings. And to make matters worse I think the rats have mites as I woke up this morning with a big bite taken out of my posterior (TMI?). So who you gonna [...]

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Glenn Gabe just pinged me that he is now seeing Groupon showing up in Google Place SERPs: According to Glen, this sucks for Groupon advertisers because: All of the Groupons I came across were expired. That’s right, when you click through the link in the clustered results, you end up at the Groupon page for [...]

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