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 something screwy about Places reviews today?” Here are some things I have seen in no particular order: Reviews disappearing from Place Pages Clicking on a…
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 the most interesting addition is “Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.” On one hand this is a…
Even though it appears that GOOG has a database of Jamaican and other nearby island businesses, you can’t add new ones.
Sometimes we SEO types forget to take our own advice. Several months ago, after not having touched my Google Places Page for years, I updated the photo. Immediately my edit was rejected and my listing was removed from Google Maps. I misinterpreted this as a problem with the new image and resubmitted the old one, but the listing still got rejected. I then decided that I was finally encountering Google’s issue with SEOs so I changed my listing name to…
Executive Summary: Who knows? But here’s a data point of one: The Main Street Meat N Fish Market recently opened in Pleasanton. My wife asked me to find their hours so I went to Google and queried “pleasanton meat n fish market“. At the top of the SERP was this result from Patch.com (congrats to them!) but no Google Place Page for the business. The Patch article pointed to their website, but it’s serving GoDaddy ads right now. I clicked…
With all of the brouhaha going on about Google’s test of a new local SERP for category searches that will make it much harder for local directories to get traffic, I became almost willfully blind to the more subtle change that had occurred to the SERP for business name queries. Thanks to Patrick Altoft for pointing out that GOOG is now linking to a business’ Place Page for these queries instead of to the business’ website. For example: According to…
Chris Silver Smith brings up a great point in today’s Local’s Only column about Google’s new local SERP design they are testing: …you might think that the newer, larger listing treatment might be beneficial for the visibility of these businesses. But, think again—for any of them which have been doing significant search marketing activities, this sea change could easily result in far lower numbers of organic referrals. Companies which aggressively have been marketing themselves have often enjoyed placement within the…
David Mihm has done it once again and published another edition of Local Search Ranking Factors. This year David surveyed 32 local search geeks to get their takes on the top factors for ranking high in Google Maps. The entire set of results is well worth the time for any business that wants to do well in local search. For those of you who just want the goods without the verbiage, here are the top factors: Claiming your Google Place…
Mike Blumenthal has a great recap of a recent webinar held by the Google Places team where they answered a lot of frequently asked questions. Here are a couple of my faves: Q: Can we use call tracking phone numbers in our listings? if not, why? A: No, please use the most local phone number available. As I mentioned in the presentation, Google aims to provide the most useful and accurate information for users, so a local phone number is…
and other great local seo tips from Dev Basu. See Page 16 for the GOOG Maps thing. via @davidmihm