testing 123

Related posts:

1. Google Places Search – 8, 9 or More Local Results to a Page – This is not a test, I repeat, this is not a test…
2. Google Continues to Test Integrated Local and Organic Results
3. Google Ending Local Listing Ad Test in San Francisco and San Diego

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Oh Samantha you naughty vixen you.

You get outed in Philadelphia dinging lawyers with fake reviews. Little did I know that you were a serial offender.  Triangle Direct Media seems to have found that you already had second profile with the same name and that you had done your dirty deed to 18 cleaning companies in Cary, NC.

Oh dear Samantha, how many others have you hurt? I think I see a pattern…

As part of Getlisted Local University we occasionally survey the attendees. We ask several questions to assess their level of knowledge about search in general and local search in particular. This survey sample size is very small and self selected from those that registered for the seminar. The participants are primarily small and medium businesses and the market area they occupy is mostly rural…

Andy Kuiper just pointed out to me, that in addition to the random UGC discussed this morning, that full on community edits of a claimed listing have returned to Places. The new (back to the future sort of new) community editing system allows logged in users to edit any listing via Places whether it is claimed or not by simply clicking on the Edit this place link on a Places Page…

Over the past week or so a number of new features have cropped up Places Pages that solicit user input in an effort to improve the quality of Places results. Google noted that “We’re doing different experiments like that on Maps to verify data is correct and up to date”.

Ability to critique the location accuracy was spotted by Daniel Hollerung and reported by Chris Silver Smith…

The recent use of Google’s review platform in Alabama to lambast a local deli’s Place page with hate reviews (and the attendant backlash) is but one example of why Google needs to implement better control over the reviews appearing on the Places pages.

Here is another. Earlier this week, one reviewer, Samantha, left 15 reviews in one day. Fourteen of them were 1 and 2 star reviews and One was a 5 star review…

In May, Linda Buquet reported on what turned out to be apparent sabotage of Places business listings by the local search firm 411Local. Here is a recent screen shot of a search in Maps still showing the Places listing defacements.

Well 411Local is back in the spotlight today. This post appeared in the Google Places Forums:

411locals is threatening to remove my places account

vbluguitar

Level 1
10/24/11

Topic of your question (reviews, categories, duplicate listing, etc…

One of the basic tenets of reputation management in local is that regular visits to your Google Places page are necessary to prevent (or perhaps mitigate) disaster. You never know when a competitor, an ex-employee, an unethical SEO or a prankster might just deface the page. And of course you no have idea when Google, The Machine from Mars, might take a shot at the page as well…

Google has made a minor update to their guideline update disallowing a listing for an ongoing service, class, or meeting:

Last Week’s Update
This Week’s Update

You also can’t create a Places listing for an ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don’t own or have the authority to represent. Please coordinate with your host to have your information displayed on their Place page as a custom attribute or within their Description field…

I found this post in the Google Places forum of interest. I hear many stories in the Local SEO world of half truths being used to confuse or obfuscate what is being done. What is your take in this case?

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Can ezlocal delete my places page when I stop using their services even though I am the one that created it prior?

cmoo
Level 1
10/18/11

Topic of your question (reviews, categories, duplicate listing, etc…

The “grand daddy” of geo sitemap generators has recently included some new features. Geo Sitemap Generator, first released by Arjan Snaterse in 2009, has added the ability to generate either a schema.org file or a microformatted file of your contact information. In addition to the features in the geo sitemap tool from 51Blocks that I reviewed last week, Geo Sitemap Generator supports multiple locations and now provides a preview of the KML file locations on a Map…

Thursday’s announcement that Google Places would autmatically update Places data more quickly if Google thought they had more trusted information generated a fair bit of dismay. The words used to describe Google’s action, while occassionaly positive in nature, generally reflected fear and anger:

Unnecessary, Bugs me
Headache, Impending doom
REALLY CONCERNS ME
BACK ASSWORDS!!!!, STUPID!!!! STUPID!!!! STUPID!!!!
Clusterf***, Very dangerous
This is terrible, Absolutely scary, insane decision

Like death and taxes their is a certain inexorable nature to Google…

Last week, I speculated that Siri, or something similar, would become the norm for interfacing with smart phones and in doing so it would define the future of local search (and everything else). Well it seems to have succeeded on the everything front but just not on the local search front. The Siri natural language interface is a metaphor for interaction that will supplant the need for typing and can provide a hands free way to interact with smaller devices when typing is dangerous (ie driving) or awkward (ie all the time)…

Yesterday Google Places announced on the LatLong Blog that they would automatically update claimed listings more quickly with information from trusted third parties end used if Google thought the information was more accurate than information that was in the Places Dashboard. They noted:

But now, if a user provides new information about a business they know — or if our system identifies information from another source on the web that may be more recent than the data the business owner provided via Google Places — the organic listing will automatically be updated and the business owner will be sent an email notification about the change…

As part of the changes to Google Places that took place in early August, Google’s Jeol Headley noted on Google + (in response to a question by Linda Buquet) that an update to a business’s description could take a long time.

Joel Headley – Aug 12 – Regarding the description not appearing — we did a change that forced descriptions to go through a longer update pipeline than other information on the Place page…

Did you know that the Google category synonym “all you can eat” is associated with Chinese & Japanese restaurants in the US but only with Japanese restaurants in Australia? That and other amazing facts can be gleaned from a recent upgrade adding international categories to our Google Places Category Tool

We have finally added categories for some of the international country and language combinations available in the Google Places dashboard…

I just received this email from Netflix. Hmm… lets change, piss everyone off and back off…

Dear Michael,

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster…

Nyagoslav of Opticlocal was first to highlight this recent Google Places Quality Guideline update:

You also can’t create a Places listing for an ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don’t own or have the authority to represent. Please coordinate with your host to have your information displayed on their Place page as a custom attribute or within their Description field…

It appears that on certain search results that Related Places, that have been typically showing at the bottom of a business’s Places page, are being moved to the main search results and showing up under “similar pages” results at the bottom of the page.

The new results are not widely returned. I was only able to see local “Pages similar to” on a limited number of locally branded searches for bed and breakfasts in St Augustine & San Francisco but not on similar searches in other markets…

There is a reported service area bug in the Google Places Dashboard that has an easy work around but terrible results if you aren’t aware of it. (Thanks to Steve King of Simpartners for also highlighting the issue to me.)

When a business selects service area the “Do not show my business address on my Maps listing” check defaults to checked EVERY time you go in an edit your record…

I decided to order a new iPhone 4s today.

I thought that the most hassle free order method was to just go to my local ATT store. It was the obvious choice. There is never a line, the staff is friendly. The affable salesman knows me by first name and is an avid iPhone owner himself. I could be catered to and I wouldn’t have to think too hard. I thought how can I go wrong?

Not to worry…

There are two simple ways of telling Google and the other search engines where your business is located via your website. One is to create a KML file and an attendant geo-sitemap. The other is to provide your full business contact information in rich snippet format on the site. Now there is a way to easily do both with one simple creation tool from Michael Borgelt of 51Blocks.

From a single input of your basic NAP + web information, the tool creates a kml file, a geo-sitemap file pointing Google to the KML file and an HTML code snippet in the new schema…

SEOMoz was given a chance to test an eye tracking device. The used the opportunity to analyze the impact of Universal results generated by Blended results, the 7-pack, shopping and videos inserted in the SERPS. I was of course most interested in the Local results. Their conclusion?

These results also suggest that the in-page Local/Places results are having a strong impact, even if they fall in the middle of the page…

This is not a tribute to Steve Jobs directly. Although in the end it may be one of his greatest tributes.

I have been in the technology field for over 30 years. I have seen a number of radical changes that became metaphors for how things were supposed to be done. Many, but not all, of these metaphors were created at the hands of Steve Jobs.

The Apple II defined a generation of PCs…

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With Apple’s announcement of the release of the new iPhone 4s and iOS5 came the expected announcement of the tight hardware and software integration of their Siri natural speech technology. It appears to be integrated at the highest level of the user interface.

Mobile search on the iPhone has been broken. Google offers up voice search but it is by no means a hands free affair and takes way too much screen interaction to provide a result…

To reinforce the critques in the article I republished from March 2009 about the Google Places customer service experience, I wanted to show a typical, current Dashboard screen shot. The screenshot demonstrates both the lack of meaningful help and the problems that still exist with seeking it out by the small business person.

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I am glad that Google has improved their Help system with a guided approach to solving problems…

Google has recently upgraded their help files and are receiving kudos for their effort. I find the effort, while laudable, very little and very late. I still find the whole Google Places “customer service experience” sorely failing at its primary task: convincing business owners that they are appreciated for something other than their credit card.

Here is an article that I wrote March 30, 2009 and I think it is as true today as it was 2 years and 4 months ago: Google Maps Places: What might customer service look like?
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Over a year ago I compared Google Maps to Yahoo Local in the nature of their communication upon listing a business in the respective services…

Local University is nearing the completion of its second year of SMB education. We just finished up a great session Burley ID with Mike Ramsey.

I am incredibly excited that our next Local U event, November 1st, is being held in my backyard in Ellicottville NY at the Holiday Valley Resort . It will feature a presentation by Cecelia Stewart of Google Places. During the session we cover a lot of ground and try to provide SMBs with a framework for either doing the work themselves or hiring it out…

The results are in. I thought that the answers of the single best word to describe Google Places could best be displayed as a Tag Cloud.

Like Google uses editorial judgement in showing search results, I used some to determine the relative weight of the words.

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