Google Archive

I’m not necessarily saying anyone should do this right now, as the implications of syncing / switching over completely to a Google +Local page are still unclear.  But, since I have virtually stopped taking on new clients for my consulting business in order to focus the vast majority of my time on GetListed, I decided to [...]

Welcome to Year Five of the Local Search Ranking Factors survey. It’s always a total thrill to compile the opinions of the world’s top experts in Local Search Marketing and be the first one to see these experts’ collective opinions about what’s working and what’s not in the world of Local Search.

Aaron Wall has done similar posts for years. But in pulling a couple of screenshots for Local University Advanced on Thursday, this one for “pizza” really struck me.

It appears to me that Plus and Places are going to live on the same layer of Google’s business data index–one layer ABOVE Mapmaker–further evidence to support the theory that today was an interface update only and does not affect anything back-end is below.

Has anyone noticed this yet? You can now review other businesses as a business on +Local. This is going to make it much, much easier for small business owners to get off the block and get just a handful of reviews of their own business pages.  They’re just going to need a point in the right [...]

Naturally, after a big interface update like the Places-Plus “merge” that just happened, the first question on everyone’s minds–from business owners to marketers–is “OK, so how do I rank in this thing?”  While my advice has always been to focus only on rankings in the general sense rather than obsessing over a certain position for [...]

Not that it is any surprise to anyone, but Google just announced the end of Place Pages. I’ll be posting my thoughts as I poke around on the new interfaces throughout the day. “Check back frequently,” as they say.

The inevitable integration of Google’s Plus and Places products, obvious since Day One of Plus, finally seems like it might be imminent. We’ve seen several signals from Google in the last couple of months that this integration may be coming sooner rather than later: 1) Google completed a major backend infrastructure update this Spring, presumably in preparation for [...]

I had the pleasure of attending Google’s Get Oregon Business Online event last week here in Portland, part of their nationwide Get Your Business Online series. I hadn’t seen much coverage of any of these events in our little Local Search community — even from Mike Blumenthal (!) — so I thought I’d share some thoughts, as well as a small photo gallery.

Has Google’s Traditional April Fool’s Joke Come a Day Early? While messing around with Google Maps I happened to come across a pop-up linking to a little video explaining 8-bit Google Maps. I applaud Google for its creativity and light-hearted nature. But I can’t help but think of the (wo)man hours it must have taken to pull this off, and how those surely would have been better spent in the Places Help Forums, or on refinements to the clustering algorithm, where they would have a real-world, and not a fantasy-world, impact?