MIHMORANDUM

Obviously, I’ve claimed my consulting business on most of the major search engines and data aggregators, and done my best to make sure that my NAP information (Name, Address, and Phone number, for those of you new to Local Search) is consistent everywhere. Sure there are a few minor variations of my official DBA (David Mihm Web Design / Local SEO) due to various aggregators’ limitations on length of business title.

But, I recently came across a crazy bug on my Google Place Page! I couldn’t believe it. My phone number had all of a sudden changed from 503-560-2755 to 971-400-6360. I had two questions–#1, of course, why had my phone number changed? #2–and more importantly–where did that number come from?

SEOs tend to work themselves into a frenzy over every minor news announcement that comes out of Mountain View–and one could probably say Local SEOs lie on the extreme end of the spectrum. In some respects, it’s understandable. Our space is constantly evolving, and to ignore these announcements can put us at a significant disadvantage relative to [...]

Back on Day Three — off to a bit of late start again :) Bo Fishback, Zaarly Zaarly is 10 months old, $1MM in seed funding, $14MM in Series A funding, and got Meg Whitman on the board.  They are doing peer-to-peer selling.  Say what you want, what you are willing to pay, and how [...]

And we’re off! Recap of Day 1 from BIA Kelsey’s Jed Williams Companies are partnering even with traditional enemies these days (ClearChannel and Cumulus, for example). Your biggest competitors are coming from markets you can’t even see right now. Being “average” at a bunch of different things means you are doomed to fail in today’s [...]

I’ll be blogging sessions on this thread throughout the next couple days. Looking forward to the conversations in the comments and/or on the ol’ Twitter.

A quick note, readers, that I’ll be heading to BIA/Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media conference next week in San Francisco.  You may remember from previous years, this has been one of my absolute favorite events to attend–much different from a typical SEO show, action-packed (and often contentious) presentations, and extremely stimulating networking.  If you’re in [...]

Hey everyone, I know I’ve been incredibly lax in posting recently.  October was a very busy month.  Including the last week of September and the first week of November, I was busy putting on four Local University events with Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling, Matt McGee, Aaron Weiche (PS–Minnesotans looking for a web gig, Aaron is hiring), [...]

Normally I don’t like to call out companies for spamming (I am happy to leave that to Professor Maps), but when it’s – this egregious – on this scale – hurting REAL Local SMB’s instead of one big corporation vs. another I feel compelled. It is about as blatant as business title spam gets.  See [...]

Most of you have probably heard that Google will go before the Senate Antitrust Committee in a couple hours.  One of the star “prosecution” witnesses is Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. Regular readers know that in general, I’d like to see more oversight of Google’s activities by somebody & I’m hoping that these proceedings lead to exactly [...]

I came across a very pleasant surprise on NYTimes.com last night: this article on the ease of crowdsourcing business closures within Google Places.   “The Oracle of Olean,” Mike Blumenthal, features prominently in the second half of the article, as the Times found his experiment on closing Google’s Mountain View location particularly illustrative and amusing. [...]