I was disappointed when Google created a new Places forum and they decided to take down the old Places forum and all of the posts that had accumulated. Google effectively minimized the efforts of the many volunteers that staffed the forums, removed material that still is of value and was deleting information that was of historical interest (to me anyways).

I was not able to gather them all but I wanted to make the posts I did save available for research purposes and to honor those volunteers that gave of their time to make the forums work (Barry Hunter, EHG aka Helmut, Treebles from the old timers and Linda Buquet, Nyagoslav, Jim from the new timers) I have archived those posts and am making them available on my website…

Adwords Express has generally improved since its initial nationwide rollout in January of 2011 and its name change in July of last year. It was initially dogged with poor targeting and huge spikes in monthly cost per click that often made their use untenable. I have continued to test it in a range of local situations and for some low dollar value campaigns in some markets it has worked very well…

Barry Hunter, Top Contributor in the Google Maps & Places forums and Maps expert, took the matter of the missing RSS feeds for the Places forum into his own hands and crafted these feed URLS.

All Topics in Google and Your Business Forum

Topics in Need advice?

Topics in Technical issue?

And these feeds should work in Google Reader only – probably wont elsewhere…

At the end of February I reported that Google was including both rich snippet reviews AND authorship images and links in blended results on the desktop. At the time these features had not appeared in the mobile results. Starting yesterday Google has once again updated the Blended display on the desktop to not show the rich snippet reviews in the blended results (they still show in organic results) nor the author links as much…

Here is the second comic in the Google Places False Negatives Series from Margaret Shulock. Google’s update on reviews was the inspiration for this comic. The snippets to share this and the previous cartoon on your site is below.

“I Can See the Future of Your Google Reviews”by Margaret Shulock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License…

411Local is one of the more aggressive local seo firms in both their pre and post sale tactics, aggressive to the point of absurdity. This recent poster on my blog explains his experience with them. If true it should be illegal but like in the case of the computer repair shop in Phoenix there is no obvious regulatory action or enforcement to prevent this sort of behavior:

I used 411 Locals a year ago for about 3 months…

Google has started the final transition to the new Google Places Forums.

When Google says shut down, they mean shut down. They will be closing down the current Places forum and taking all of the existing material off line. All existing posts will be redirected to the home page of the new forum by Thursday of this week. All current and past posts (there are 39699 of them) will be taken down and will no longer be accessible…

“Google Places Enforcement Plan”by Margaret Shulock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at blumenthals.com.

Wanting to get across the point that SMBs need to read the Google Guidelines in a recent seminar, I worked with Margaret Shulock, a nationally syndicated cartoonist who lives down the road, to develop this comic. If you would like to share this with your readers please do…

The last 3 or 4 months in Places have been quite erratic. Some data that had been posting from Places in moments had gone to weeks. It seemed that things like descriptions could take 6 to 7 weeks. Google has just announced a new speedier update cycle of “usually a few days” for most data and “about a week” for photos in this forum post. It will still take a number of weeks to resolve dupes and merges…

Frequent contributor Plamen has pointed out a new “behavior” in how Google is handling the main search display of new Google reviews showing up on the Place page; adding a link to the location in the “around the web” review section. Whether this is a bug or one more way to insert another link to an additional Google property in the main search results is unclear.

Oddly the link heads off to Google Maps and generates loc:search showing the location and place…

Monday, I am presented the keynote, Google is From Mars and You are From Venus - Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Google at the Mid-Atlantic Innkeepers Conference in Williamsburg.  It was an incredibly well run and fun conference. Meeting with both aspiring and successful bed and breakfast owners was educational and inspirational. Although I think I will keep my day job.

For those that were in the presentation these links will provide background information and details for a pathway to dig deeper into the world of managing your listing in Google Places and ethically approaching the review process…

The staff at Local U have been hard at work putting together the Spring conference schedule for Local University.  We are particularly excited to announce the first Advanced workshop for SEO professionals and experienced local search marketers that will take place in Seattle on June 7.  Never before have so many Local Search experts been in one room at the same time, and it’ll be a great opportunity to pick all of our collective brains to get a leg up on your competition…

Yext is doing local differently. I don’t normally write reviews of commercial products but when they offered me two free listings I decided to explore the value of the service for local SEOs.

In local citation building we have come to expect that it might take 8, 16 or even 20 weeks for a citation to make its way into the search engines. The local ecosystem, a complicated web of relationships and feeds, is to some extent a technology mired in the last millennium…

Over the weekend I reworked Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry’s publisher & authorship Rich Snippets. Previously I had only had the rel=author snippet on the home page but based on other examples that were showing in Local I added the rel=publisher rich snippet to the home page only and left the rel=author snippet on the home page and every other page. I had previously added review rich snippets on both the review and home pages…