LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Readers of this collection of hypertext may recall my tale of woe in dealing with a San Jose Auto Repair shop who done me wrong last year.  The subtitle of that little missive was “A lesson in reputation management” and the subsequent flames that sprung up on various local reviews sites showed how rubbing someone [...]

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image liberally appropriated from Roger Hollander
Thanks to Vanessa Fox as always for eliciting grains of truth from Google.  At last week’s Google I/O conference Matt Cutts confirmed that there was an algo change at the beginning of May that will likely be affecting sites that generate a lot of long-tail traffic: 
”this is an algorithmic change [...]

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I haven’t seen them live on Yelp yet because years ago Jeremy Stoppleman banned my email address, but that’s another story.
The big question - are Facebook’s Like buttons complementary to reviews or do they cannibalize them?

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Last week Google launched a controversial new feature on local Place Pages - a list of nearby businesses that promotes local competitors on a business’ Place Page, even if that business has claimed their GLBC profile.  With this move Google has perhaps decided that the Yellow Pages industry is totally off their rockers - many [...]

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I just sent an email out to a bunch of local seo types and saw this on the “message sent” confirmation screen:

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I am not the first blogger to claim that the NYT has some questionable editorial practices, but the use of links in a recent article by Claire Cain Miller on the how Lifestyle Lift got busted for faking online reviews caught my eye.

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Just caught this article in the NYTimes about how Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had fined Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, $300,000 for ordering its employees to write fake reviews of its face-lift procedure on sites like RealSelf.
Let’s put aside the ethics of faking reviews for a minute and reflect on how effective a strategy [...]

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Over the past couple of weeks there have been a number of new local search sites come out of the woodwork and I thought it was time to say hi and give them a little linkjuice.
Centerd.com - These guys just relaunched their site.  They are targeting things to do in New York and other cities [...]

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according to TechCrunch.  The update now allows for writing reviews from the Iphone so get ready for a lot of “I am writing this while drunk!” type stuff.  I use the current Yelp App once in a while but I find that it becomes frustrating pretty quickly once you try to use the map to [...]

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Recently we hired a great bay area child photographer to do some shots of our children.  While I loved the photos, I was even more impressed with the follow up email I just received from the photographer.  Check out this excerpt:
I was wondering if you would be able to write some reviews for me on [...]

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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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When I started at InsiderPages, Yelp didn’t exist, but there was this service called AngiesList that we were obsessed with. AngiesList was a pioneer in figuring out how to get contractor reviews and ratings out of people.
Back in the day, InsiderPages made a splash by giving out $5 Starbucks cards for five business reviews.  One [...]

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Some notes from Peter Krasilovsky’s interview with Sonia McFarland, head of business development of Yelp.  Not much new here but a couple of interesting data points.
- Yelp’s demo is older than you think
- In order to be an advertiser on the site you need to “qualify” by having a minimum number of reviews and minimum [...]

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I have been using an iPhone for the past two weeks and it’s pretty clear to me that the only thing that is going to stop me from using it more and more to find things is a fatal car crash.  That’s why my loved ones and I are glad to hear about a number [...]

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Steve “McStud” Espinosa has another very useful local search post that shows why you should be subscribing to his blog’s feed.  Here’s the gist of it:
He tested how to get more calls from your Yahoo Local listing.  This technique resulted in “1.8x more calls”:

Insert Keyword into Business Name
Upgrade to a Yahoo Local Enhanced Listing
Write a [...]

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