For the most part Places spam, in all of its forms, gets dispersed throughout the marketplace. The net affect is deleterious but the brunt rarely falls on the same real bricks and mortar shops time after time. Imagine that you lived in a town and worked in a field that has a single (and apparently compulsive) competitor that is willing to go to any lengths to gain a leg up in Google Places. You don’t just suffer a reported closing, or the rare piece of competitor review spam or the odd spam listing but you and all of your honest competitors suffer repeated abuses at scale…

411 Locals has been implicated in widespread Places listing sabotage and accused of threatening an SMB. Well they are back in the forums with this recent report of their widespread spam. You can’t keep a good black hat down.

Poster HoskinsRick noted a range of examples of spamming that shared a number of features; keyword laden business names, either superpages or keyword focused domains, Place Page updates that referenced the address or domain name, plenty of fake reviews, royalty free photos and spot-on centroid locations:

Placentia Accident Attorney
Accident Attorney Raleigh
Accident Attorney Hartford
Accident Attorney Irvine
Accident Attorney Oklahoma City
Accident Attorney Oklahoma City
Accident Attorney Indianapolis
Accident Attorney Philadelphia

I can not say with 100% assurance that all of these are from 411 Locals but I called the first 4 or 5 on the list…

Like many people, I have a less expensive, older LCD display at home that works just fine. With one exception. It makes Google Ads look just like a genuine search result. Obviously a screen shot doesn’t capture the “failings” of my typical display so I took a shot of the screen using my iPhone where you too can experience the lack of contrast. There is absolutely no distinction between the Adwords Express Ad and the local result…

Pew Research just released a report on The rise of in-store mobile commerce that looked at how Americans used their phones to assist with purchasing decisions this holiday season. In aggregate 52% of users relied on their cell phone to either check with a friend, look at product reviews or check pricing online. Younger users were significantly more likely to do so than users over 50.

It means that any store selling commodity retail products can look at significant price pressure from this behavior…

I first noticed this yesterday where every search for “storage + city” returned a 3-pack result regardless of the city that was searched (ie storage Toronto, storage Detroit, storage Miami etc etc etc ). This was true even on international searches like storage Paris, Fr.This change apparently occurred about two weeks ago and despite doing a range of searches both logged in and not, the ”storage + city” never returned a Blended Result nor a Pack other than the 3-Pack…

Gib Olander currently serves as Director of Business Development for Localeze and frequent speaker at search marketing conferences. Localeze is a leading provider of merchant content management services, which includes; collection, organization, validation and distribution of merchant content. This content is widely used in the local ecosystems and the data is the foundation of place information at a large number of sites including Bing, Facebook and Twitter amongst others…

I wondered if either of you had ever written an article (or seen a good one) on the merits of link building to a Place Pages. This is widely mentioned, of course, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything attesting the merits of the practice. – Miriam Ellis 

I see this piece of [mis]information being repeated and passed around local circles. Here is the response that I gave to Miriam as to my thoughts about the practice of linking to your Places Page:

This is a myth that has been spread around for years and is total poppycock…

A number of contributors to the Places forums (Treebles, Helmut, Nyagoslav, Linda Buquet, myself) have assembled this first shot at a list of known bugs in Google Places and the Google Places Dashboard. Google is not currently publishing such a list and until they do, this list might help you understand if what you are experiencing is a known issue or not.

My hope is that by putting these in a single location it will save some of you time and/or frustrations as you experience the problem…

This person posted this detailed log of his efforts to resolve his merged business before the new unmerging repair process was in place in the Google Help Forums. He had previously posted this information at Linda Buquet’s blog as a counterpoint to her article about improving Google customer service. It very much reinforces the issues that Matt McGee had and is having with his wife’s listing…

Google’s problem solving paths for fixing things that go wrong with a business listing have always been confusing. There are a range of possible (Report a Problem, MapMaker, Troubleshooters, Places Dashboard) to fixing a problem  and there is the temptation to keep trying one after the other in an effort to get the problem fixed. Most SMBs and SEOs figure that getting a simple data error fixed should happen in near real time and think that if they just tweak one more variable then the fix should be in tomorrow…

The Preschool Learning Center (PLC), a small school for the developmentally disadvantaged in rural upstate NY , is like most not for profits: overworked, understaffed, a heart of gold and a very limited budget. There is probably no better program for kids with autism anywhere and certainly not in the markets they serve.

We helped them build their website in 2008 and it has been moderately successful for them…

Nyagoslav is a recent graduate from University of Economics in Varna, Bulgaria. After a summer internship at Label Bank, Osaka as an in-house online marketing executive he co-founded OptiLocal, a local search marketing company, in 2011. He has written extensively on local search marketing at his company’s blog and recently became a TC in the Google Places forums. He is intimately familiar with Google Places and has international experience working in Local…

With the rollout of Google Search Plus Your World, there has been a great deal of discussion about whether Google’s actions are a basis for antitrust. I tend to agree with internet lawyer Eric Goldman’s assessment:

From a legal standpoint, I don’t think Search Plus Your World adds very much to the antitrust complaints against Google (and some of the complaints, especially Twitter’s, seem more like sour grapes than bona fide concerns)…

Darren is the founder of Whitespark, the SEO firm that built the popular Local Citation Finder. Darren has been developing websites since 1996 and optimizing them for the search engines since 2001. He’s currently helping to organize the first international GetListed University workshops in Edmonton, Canada.

***

#1)What is a data aggregator? How can they help improve my search rankings?

The big 3 data aggregators are the most important sites for any US based business to start their citation building…

…

…

Most of you are familiar with Andrew Shotland, a well know Local SEO practitioner and author of www.localseoguide.com. He has provided his services to numerous media, ecommerce companies, franchises and start-ups including Bing.com, Amazon, DexKnows.com, Yellowbook.com, The Yellow Pages Group Co. of Canada and many, many other big players (space limitations precludes me from including his whole list …

Jim Moran is co-founder of Yipit with Vinicius Vacanti. Yipit was an early entrant into deal aggregation space and the company recently raised $6 million in funding. The site gathers offers from Groupon, LivingSocial and nearly 300 deal services, and sends the best to you each day based on your preferences.

In a previous life, Jim worked in mergers & acquisitions at The Blackstone Group…

Reviews continued to be a dominant theme in 2011. Ted Paff is the owner of CustomerLobby.com, a solution to help local businesses to get, manage and publish customer reviews. He is more familiar than most with all of the realities of SMBs and reviews as he lives and breathes them every day of his business life and most of the rest of his day as well. I know for a fact that he loses sleep pondering the many review related issues that affect him and his clients…

David Mihm is a passionate golfer and when he has time to play, maintains a scratch handicap. He is also passionate about local and is one of the people in the industry that you should pay attention to.

His online tool set at Getlisted.org has helped innumerable SMBs get their business’s noticed. His annual Local Search Ranking Factors is a foundational survey that helps virtually every local SEO every year…

1. Particular postions, points or places
2. Centers of activity, attention, or concentration

Loci 2011 is a 2011 year end review of articles in Local Search that will be appearing over the next week(s). It is a series that I started at the end of 2008 and and this will make its fourth appearance. I have always thought that collaboration & cooperation are the best way to increase our understanding of the world…

There is a story unfolding at Google that indicates a huge shift in their thinking about Places. Google, over the past 9 months has been making significant investments in creating support mechanisms for Google Places. Yes, you read that right. But just to be sure let me repeat myself: Google has been making significant investments in creating functioning support mechanisms for SMB problems with Places…

Google has finally  provided some public guidance, if not a a long awaited fix, to deal with the persistent Places error state “We currently do not support the location“.

The forum comment provides a step by step procedure for assessing and coping with (but not solving) the issue. The listing nuking message, in the system for sometime, seems to have been occurring more frequently over the past 3 or 4 months…

The ability to provide a Google check-in offer is now live. The feature has been added to the Offer coupon creation option in the Goolge Places dashboard and a detailed help file has been added to Places for Business Help area. Google describes the process as follows:

Allowing customers to check-in when they redeem offers
If your customers have to visit your locations in order to do business with you, you can request that they check-in on Google Maps for Mobile before they redeem your offer…

It was a year ago April that Google made the first public announcement regarding the number of claimed Places listing. The number came in at 4 million worldwide. Yesterday at the BIA/Kelsey ILM West conference, Jeff Aguero noted that Google Places now has 8 million claimed Place Pages (out of 50MM worldwide). It was just this past March that Marissa Mayer noted that there were 6 million claimed Places…

Last week Google while rolled out new Talkbin features and also reduced its price for the month of December by 80% The monthly price for the anonymous feedback service was lowered from $25/mo per location to $5/mo. per location. Tonight in my inbox I received notice of an new promo, pricing the product at $1/mo. per location…. a 96% reduction.

The product, a very slick text based customer feedback tool, is positioned by Google as the next generation of customer service and at a dollar a month becomes a no-brainer for any bricks and mortar business looking to improve customer feedback…

Last week I reported out a discovered Google Places Help page (since taken down but visible here) that discussed using the Places Coupons as a Check-in Coupon  for Google Plus. This afternoon the folks at VentureBeat received a confirmation from Google that checkin offers from Places will be coming to Google+ next week:

“While prepping for a test of a new check-in offer feature, we published a support center article a little early and have since removed the article…

Onsite “Review Stations” AOK with Google

Several weeks ago, I attended a Google GetYourBusiness online seminar and I was surprised to hear the speaker strongly encouraging SMBS to install a computer at their places of business to use as a station where clients, immediately upon completing a transaction, could easily leave a review on their Google Place’s page.

Last week, Scott Falcone sent me a link to a copy of an email from the Google Dealer Jumpstart Team endorsing the idea of review stations…

29Prime is easy to spot as a deceptive local seo company that preys on unsuspecting small business folks eager to “be on the first page of Google”. Like many low-life firms of their ilk, they have a number of “aliases” (aka 29Live, 29Maps, 29SEM, 29Search, Locallistings.com etc, etc.) they use to make tracking them a little more difficult.

Their robo calls ring into my office no less than 4 times a week with pitches like “Select one now to claim your free listing on Google”, “We are Google’s 6th largest provider of data”, “We guarantee first page placement, “We are Google Authorized to claim your listing”…

While perusing the Google Places Offer Help files I found a page discussing Check-in Offers via Google+. It notes:

If your customers have to visit your locations in order to do business with you, you can request that they check-in on Google+ in order to redeem your offers. They can choose to share the check-in publicly or with some of their circles, which helps spread the word about your business on Google+…