LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Mike Blumenthal’s When Will Google Places Fix Reviews? hit a nerve, as I imagine it would for any business that relies on Google Places as an important part of its presence on the Web.  I spend a lot of time sending emails to Mike and other Local SEO’s that go something like this “Have you noticed [...]

[Read more →]

Liveblogging Carter Maslan’s talk at BIA Kelsey’s ILM 2010: The long tail of local is extremely long The launch of Places search increased the clicks to third party sites by 400% Places is trying to increase the “surface area” of local information There is a local dimension to almost everything (critics, tribes, events, news, credentials, [...]

[Read more →]

No doubt you may have read about how some jerk used his bad reputation to rank better in Google and rip people off.  Today Google announced that they have tweaked their algorithm to demote businesses that have bad reputations.  And I quote: we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article [...]

[Read more →]

Google Places has updated its Quality (read “Anti MapSPAM”) Guidelines – see below. It’s unclear whether these updates reflect additions to the AntiSPAM algorithm or if they are just suggestions, but GOOG does seem to be clearly addressing some of the most obvious MapSPAM strategies – particularly around business names, locations and categorization. To me [...]

[Read more →]

Even though it appears that GOOG has a database of Jamaican and other nearby island businesses, you can’t add new ones.

[Read more →]

I noticed “Hotpot” was trending on Twitter and discovered that tonight Google launched it’s response to Yelp and all of the other local social recommendation thingies.  Don’t have time for a pseudo-thoughtful post on the subject so I thought a few screenshots would do.  More later:

[Read more →]

Ionadas Local and Sentient Services just published the results of an eye-tracking study on the (old as of 10/27/10) Google Local SERPs that is certainly worth a look. Here’s a summary of the results and some screenshots: 1. People seem to be ignoring the maps 2. This is probably one of the reasons why GOOG [...]

[Read more →]

While putting together the Top 10 Reviews Sites In Google Place Search report, we noticed what we thought were testimonials from a business’ website showing up in the reviews section of the result. See the below screenshot from a SERP for “Los Angeles Car Dealers“: In its FAQ on Rich Snippets, Google states that testimonials [...]

[Read more →]

Given the increased prominence of reviews sites in new Google Place Search SERPs, I thought it might be interesting to see which ones were showing up most often. The following is sort of 2010 version of my 2009 IYP SEO Rankings Report. This data is hardly thorough – I only looked at the top 10 [...]

[Read more →]