The decision process that you go through when deciding to make changes to your site can be tough. Even if those changes are likely necessary and needed, determining the best way to implement them can make you pause, and spend a lot of time considering all the potential alternatives that you might have. You [...]…

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…

If you’ve never used Twitter before, it can be a little intimidating when you’re first starting out. You’re faced with a message on the front page of the site telling you to “Follow your interests,” and promising “instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities, and what’s happening around the world.”

Then [...]…

A little known feature of the latest iOS 5 software for the iPhone is that it disables cookies by default. I wasn’t aware of this until yesterday when I tried to book a hotel and was trying to browse three of the largest travel websites – Premier Inn, Late Rooms and Travelodge and none of them were working.

All these sites detect your user agent, set a cookie and then display the mobile version of the site…

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+…

Google has started rejecting Offers from Google Places for quality and policy violations. Business owners that have had Offers rejected will receive an email with an indication of which guideline was not satisfied. Offers that do not provide actual discounts or dollar value will be suspended. Here is a rejection email:

From: googleplaces-noreply@google.com
Date: December 2, 2011 5:27:40 AM EST
To: xxxx@xxx…

Whenever Ajax enter the conversation for an SEO or internet marketer, chances are good there will always be a deep sigh or an “ugh” face. While it is true that search engines are getting better at indexing this type of content, we still aren’t at the point that you can realistically rely on them to index it properly or even at all. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it, it just means you need to take some extra steps to make sure that type of content is visible to crawlers and non Ajax users…

Six months ago we started rolling out a new look and feel for Search, News, Maps, Translate, Gmail and a bunch of other products. Our goal was to create a beautifully simple and intuitive user experience across Google.

We’re now ready for the next stage of our redesign—a new Google bar that will enable you to navigate quickly between our services, as well as share the right stuff with the right people easily on Google+…

In honor of the new Yoast Google+ page, I’ve taken questions there which I’ll answer here, so everyone can benefit. Do you think the increased number of metatags released by Google are good for webmasters and the web, or just making things more complicated for the amateur so only those that can afford SEO consultancy [...]

Questions and Answers – Google+ edition is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast – Tweaking Websites…

Are you a robot? A spammer? A sock puppet? A trusted author and content developer? A trusted agent in the eyes of Google? (More on trusted agents below.)

When you interact on a social network, or write a review online or update information to an internet mapping service, how much does the service you [...]…

This summer we posted a video that takes a peek under the hood of search, sharing the methodology behind search ranking and evaluation. Through this methodology, we make roughly 500 improvements to search in a typical year. As we often discuss, that’s a lot of change, and it can be hard to make sense of it all.

Following up on our last video, we wanted to share with you a short history of the evolution of search, highlighting some of the most important milestones from the past decade—and a taste of what’s coming next…

Awareness of Google’s new, aggressive & annoying Bubble ads have been creeping into the SMBs field of vision since their introduction 10 days ago. Articles have been posted at a number of sites (here, here & here) questioning their purpose. On Saturday alone, there were 4 posts in the Places Forum from SMBs specifically about Google advertising against a given place (here, here, here and here)…

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Several other instances of Google Plus integration into local search results have been found by Renan Cesar, a Brazilian search marketer.

In both of these examples, the images, when clicked, go to an intermediate search result highlighting the appropriate Plus Page with an option to add them to your circle. In the first instance the intermediary result shows a recent post. In both cases the Plus page is correctly identified…

A number of years back, I remember being humbled by a homework assignment crayon drawing by a friend’s son which listed what he was thankful for, and included his parents, his sister, and shoes that Thanksgiving. We take so much for granted that we should be thankful that we have. A few friends and [...]…

The ever observant Plamen and his friend Stacy sent along a Places Search screenshot that clearly shows a Google Plus Page icon next to a Places search result:

When you click on the icon it shows a Google Plus Page for a different Transmission service.

It makes sense that Google would integrate Google Plus pages with their Local results. What better way to both allow a business to highlight the Page’s presence and incent other businesses to claim their Google Plus Page and keep it updated with meaningful information…

A Google patent granted last week describes how the search engine might enable people to experiment with changing the weight and value of different ranking signals for web pages to gauge how those changes might influence the quality of search results for specific queries. The patent lists Misha Zatsman, Paul G. Haahr, Matthew D. [...]…

This search for “Child Protection Services, NY” provides an obvious example of Google’s inability to target a specific ad against a specific place with their new Info Bubble Ads.  It provides great fodder for my first installment of Rogue’s Gallery of Inappropriate Bubble Ads…

There is some irony that the Archdiocese of New York* is sandwiched between Children’s Rights and the NY Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Child in the Map search results and I suppose the bottom ad for a Child Protection Lawyer is somehow oddly relevant in this context…

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Should every place & business that exists in our everyday life be used to sell against? Should that specific, very real entity with its history of sentiment and purpose be leveraged to shill for something without their knowledge? And if so what is appropriate to sell against that place? I asked myself that question as I explored some of the “bubble ads” that Google was showing in the info bubble for these Places…

As the jokes were flying about how distasteful Google’s new Map’s info ad venue was, I became curious as to exactly how unseemly it really was. So I looked.

As Glen Gabe pointed out it may very well be necessary for SMB’s to take out ads defensively. Greg Sterling suggested that Google think about a Pandora like subscription so you could search ad free. For me, it reminds Google’s ads on the Map info bubble reminds me of ads on “park benches” that sit amid the fumes on street corners…

As Facebook pushes the boundaries of privacy, Google is pushing the boundaries of ad placement. Like all corporations, Google needs to respond to the demands of a market that requires ever increasing income growth. One way to do that in the absence of significant page view growth is to monetize every remaining square inch of Google.

That seems to be whats happening in Maps where Laura Alisanne points out that Google is now placing ads on the info bubble for a given business…

I gave a presentation on SEO and Social Media at the Internet Summit 2011, in Raleigh NC yesterday, in an Advanced SEO session with Lindsay Wassell, Michael Marshall, and Markus Renstrom – head SEO of Yahoo! Daryl Hemeon has a nice write-up of the presentations at Advanced SEO – Internet Summit Day 2 Notes.

[...]…

Imagine being able to highlight any text on a web page and search the Web based upon that text? Or an easier way to embed videos or other content in windows that will appear and open up without launching a new browser window.

Now imagine that your Google Plus Circles could engage in [...]…

We make roughly 500 changes to our search algorithm in a typical year. Our goal is to make search run so smoothly, you don’t even notice the changes. That said, we like giving you insights into what we’re doing behind the search results you see each day. Today on Inside Search, we’ve posted a recap of some of the algorithmic changes we’ve made over just the past couple weeks. These changes improve everything from translation, to snippets to autocomplete…

Many small shop owners think of themselves as being in more than one business. They have (perhaps loosely and imprecisely) marketed themselves under two or more brands into their local market and the allure of doing so on Google Places is strong. Should they continue to do so?

Scott of BreakTheSeal in the UK asked me how to best handle this situation. He inquired:

If you have a business, offering 2 separate services but at the same address, under slightly different names, is it good to have 2 separate Google Places profiles or to amalgamate them into 1? My predicament comes from a current client, a hair salon that also offers a specialist wig service for cancer patients…

Once upon a time, when you searched the Web at Google, the results displayed were limited to a list of 10 pages with page title, snippet of text from meta description or page content, and URL to that page. We’ve been seeing the search engines diversifying what they might display for certain pages, with [...]…

With the rollout of the new grey pin local search results, Google has continued to increase the amount of information from your Places page that is visible in the main search results. This is particularly true with the new Branded One Box result.

Google is prepared to turn over to your company the better part of the information above the fold and with a little work and some luck you can maximize what the searcher sees about your business…

Searchmetrics published some research yesterday showing the winners and losers of the Google Freshness update but in my opinion the issue is a bit more complicated than this.

The freshness update is like an enhanced version of the QDF algorithm. QDF applied to searches that were trending whereas the freshness update applies to searches where a user is likely to need new information.

Brands

The big losers in this update are going to be brands…