LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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