Category: Online Maps

It’s Apple Maps week over here. Just wanted to point you over to my latest post on AMM, Apple Maps Is Not Intended To Be A General Business Directory, my rant on why I think Apple Maps should allow home-based businesses to be listed. Kind of ironic given this from the U.S. Small Business Administration: “What do Apple Computer, Hershey’s, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and the Ford Motor Company have in common? These well-known corporations all started out as home-based businesses. In…

A little Friday rant on the Apple Maps blog entitled Why Do Map Services Not Give a Shit About Businesses? Typical ignorant American that I am, I had never used Nokia’s maps.  Then when they made their big, in-your-face-Apple/Google announcement, I had to check it out.  The first thing I noticed was that there was almost no effort to communicate to businesses how to work with the service.  In fact, the UI was so lacking in that regard, that in…

My post on Bizible’s new local search ranking factors study is now up at SearchEngineLand. You can also get more detail on the study and the results on Bizible’s blog. As mentioned in my SEL post, Bizible claims the study is scientifically valid and while in general I liked their approach, I can think of a number of flaws in the methodology – the #1 flaw being that they are not Google 🙂  And of course CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL…

Mike Blumenthal has some concerns re Google Places’ new user review feeds: When was the last time you heard a reviewer ask for an RSS feed of their reviews? Well maybe some reviewer some place did… but then I suggest you follow Google’s instructions and go find it. Instead of attaching it to the obvious place in your main Google profile or making the existing review list more visible it is is hidden in your Hotpot area. Hidden?  More like non-existent.  I…

Greg Linden uncovers a potential new Google Maps ranking signal: direction requests: …certain very large search engines have massive logs of people asking for directions from A to B, hundreds of millions of people and billions of A to B queries. And, it appears this data may be as or more useful than user reviews of businesses and maybe GPS trails for local search ranking, recommending nearby places, and perhaps local and personalized deals and advertising. Geeky paper on the…

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 from websites using microformats such as hReview will show up this way.  The strange thing is that FelixChevrolet.com doesn’t use microformats and the so-called testimonials…

Fred Wilson has a great local discussion going on the AVC blog about how to shorten a Google Maps URL to make it easier to send. One of the commenters suggested checking out http://amap.to/ Here’s the shortened link for Pleasanton, CA: http://amap.to/evtp9 Pretty cool.

Twitter just announced it’s launching an API that will allow developers to add latitude & longitude to any tweet. There’s all sorts of funky services this could lead to such as a site that tracks the locations of Twitter spammers for people to drop nukes on and such (if they are dumb enough to opt in).  But I am thinking this could be a pretty big deal for players in the local search industry for the following reasons:

Update: MyMapInfo, the SEO who was working on Artie’s site, commented on Will’s post that I had mistaken him for a spammer when he has been trying to get his client to rank well after the client was the victim of map spammers.  I’ll take him at his word and apologize for impugning his reputation on these hallowed pages.  That said, I do think MyMapInfo could have avoided this public flogging by not linking to his client’s site from the…

In the previous post, where I stumbled on to ads on a Google Map on Merchant Circle, “Mappin’” Mike Blumenthal took me to the local search woodshed with the following comment: In mid March, Google announced that they have changed the API to allow the hosting site show ads along with searches for local businesses performed through the API. I think that is what you are seeing at MC. Now I am no investigative journalist, but I can’t take one…