I was lucky enough to be able to speak at the wonderful State of Search conference in Dallas yesterday about local SEO for multi-location brands. Brand local SEO often gets lumped in with local SEO for SMBs and they are starkly different engagements and not often talked about in the local SEO space, so hopefully this […]
The SEM Post and Search Engine Land are both reporting that Thumbtack.com has experienced a seemingly complete recovery after receiving a manual link hammer to the head from Google (they don’t like the term “penalty”) which rendered the site all but invisible in Google’s SERPs. Jennifer Slegg goes into great detail speculating as to what Thumbtack […]
It’s kind of big news in the Local SEO biz that Thumbtack.com* has received a manual action penalty from Google for unnatural linkbuilding. If you study Thumbtack’s backlink profile or read some of the articles on the subject, you can see that perhaps parts of their backlink strategy may have gotten them into trouble, which […]
UPDATE June 1, 2015: FALSE ALARM! May 23rd is a day that shall live in Local SEO infamy… (Click to enlarge) Seeing this across several U.S.-based local directory sites. Not across the board, but more than a few. See Did Local Directories Get Hit By Google’s Doorway Page Algo? to see how directory rankings may […]
Because the listing isn’t closed… Okay, so that makes no sense right? Let me start from the beginning. We have a client that has a Ford dealership. When doing searches for Ford + geo, we were seeing the above “permanently closed” business showing up in the Knowledge Graph panel. So we had a team member […]
If SEMRush data is directionally correct, this may be a reason why Yelp is looking to sell. Should rebrand as Yikes! pic.twitter.com/UqplA4ZLSq — Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) May 11, 2015 Perhaps SEMRush is still updating but if its organic search traffic graphs are even close to accurate it looks like May is the month that Google […]
Update 4/11/15: According to a little birdie who spoke with Gary Iyles at the BrightonSEO conference, Gary “guaranteed” pack rankings won’t be affected. Guess we shall see… Google’s pending Mobile-Friendly algo update has become the Apple Watch of SEO – I can’t look at my Twitter feed without a blur of “How to get ready for […]
And you won’t believe what happens next… Google will lose market share in Local (trying not to repeat myself here so check out the link to Streetfight for more thoughts on GOOG, Facebook, Apple, etc.) Google will significantly change the layout of its local pack results at least twice, causing me to break out the […]
Last week, when we uncovered that Apple Maps had cut deals with at least ten new companies (e.g. Yext, Location3, Yodle, etc.) to provide business listings data, I got a few emails asking what the big deal was. Here’s what I see is going on: Apple has come to realize that organizing the world’s local […]
Their clients’ local and organic search rankings and traffic started going up 🙂 Seriously though, earlier this week I presented this talk at the fantastic State of Search conference in Dallas. One of the things I tried to stress is the importance of a diversified SEO strategy for local clients. Here at Local SEO Guide, […]