Category: Google Maps

Justin O’Beirne has published another amazingly detailed analysis of Apple Maps and how it has developed compared to Google Maps. While I shall yield to Justin’s mastery of all things geospatial, I feel like he kind of punted on his analysis of Apple Maps’ business listings data. O’Beirne observes that Apple Maps has few business listings for Markleeville, CA and then claims “all of the businesses shown on Apple’s Markleeville map seem to be coming from Yelp, Apple’s primary place data provider.”…

Since local spam is a hot topic around the Local SEO Sphere these days, I figured it would be fun to look at brands that are violating the Google My Business guidelines for representing your business and getting away with it. Because I mean, what’s the point of guidelines if large advertisers and brands can get away with obvious and blatant violations, amirite? So, speaking of obvious and blatant, let’s get this one out of the way up front. It’s good…

It was a pretty big deal to the world of local search when Google removed “Search Tools” from their search engine. It may seem like NBD, but everyone in local search knew that that was the best way to see what a local search looked like in a different location from your own. After that was eliminated, there was a mad dash to find out how to best spoof searches from other locations. While there were a few ways to do…

The 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors, a survey of Local SEO professionals on what they think it takes to rank in local search, was just released at MozCon Local/Local U. Andrew and I both love participating in the survey, as it’s a chance to see what the Local SEO hive mind is thinking. I highly recommend checking it out to see how people are thinking about local search rankings. Coming out of the 2017 version, the talk of the town…

Today at State of Search Yext’s Christian Ward mentioned this result from “the world’s largest correlation engine”. Kind of says it all: BTW super-impressed with this year’s State of Search. It always was a great conference but it has grown up big time. Kudos to DFWSEM.

There has been a big push by some in the local search space to have Local SEOs vigorously engage in reporting “spam” on Google Maps/Google My Business. The GMB profiles in question are ones like this: Per the screenshot, they are violating Google’s guidelines with their name and by breaking the no adult content rule and thus are eligible to be removed if reported. This is something that I find very interesting, for a few reasons: I don’t think it’s spam…

We have been seeing a lot of mismatched locations in the local packs lately but this one takes the cake, er curry…: (Click to enlarge)   You know you can’t beat Nayana Eye Care in Pradesh. They’re “recognized by the Food Corporation of India” and have “world-class sterility.”

We have been playing around with Google’s MapMaker product a lot lately. While this won’t come as a shock to the seasoned local search professionals out there let me tell you, it’s a buggy product. Just the other day I had it return auto-suggest results in what I think was Dutch. While UI glitches are one thing, it’s totally different when the issue is with the local data itself. I was looking at MapMaker data for a large, multi-location client…

Do you find your edits in Google MapMaker often get denied? Ever since Maptivists shed some light on the exploits that were possible using MapMaker, it has been harder and harder to get legitimate changes made. Most of the time I see MapMaker edits get rejected, regardless of their validity. A good example was when I deleted the category “Brewpub” for Noble Ale Works (which you should visit if you are ever in Orange County). It seemed like a pretty non-controversial…