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Spammed, Slammed and Shut, Desperate SMB Closes Down his Places Listing

Mike — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:25:57 +0000

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 Back in the News

Mike — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:47:22 +0000

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…

Is Google Intentionally Trying to Minimize the Fact that These are Ads?

Mike — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:22:01 +0000

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…

Why Bricks & Mortar Retail Will Continue to Get Harder – Mobile Price Comparisons

Mike — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:47:25 +0000

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…

Is Google Reducing the Local Search Result Footprint?

Mike — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:11:26 +0000

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…

Loci 2011: Gib Olander

Mike — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:32:01 +0000

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…

Google Places Myth: Linking to Your Places Page

Mike — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:05:08 +0000

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…

Catalog of Current Bugs in Google Places and the Google Places Dashboard

Mike — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:00:20 +0000

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…

The Long and Winding Tale of Trying to Fix a Merged Listing

Mike — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:33:53 +0000

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 Places Troubleshooting: Best Practice for Dealing with a Merged Listing

Mike — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:08:22 +0000

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…

Planning for Social – A Small Not For Profit Takes the Next Step with a Social Media Assessment Report

Mike — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:00:38 +0000

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…

Loci 2011- Nyagoslav Zhekov

Mike — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:10:52 +0000

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…

Branded Local Search Results: Google Vs. Bing

Mike — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:52:20 +0000

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)…

Loci 2011 – Darren Shaw

Mike — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:00:03 +0000

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.

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#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…

New Login Screen Makes Google Account Creation More Obvious

Mike — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 05:16:14 +0000

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Google Add Plus to Search Suggestions

Mike — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:15:40 +0000

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Loci 2011- Andrew Shotland

Mike — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:19:13 +0000

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 …

Locai 2011 – Jim Moran

Mike — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:00:46 +0000

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…

Loci 2011: Ted Paff

Mike — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:05:39 +0000

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…

Loci 2011- David Mihm

Mike — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:53:06 +0000

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…