For years the New York Times website was a great example I could point people to of a very high profile site doing one of the basics of SEO very very wrong.
If you visited the site at “http://newyorktimes.com/” you would see a toolbar pagerank of 7 for its homepage. If instead you [...]…
I was struck by the obvious similarity between the visual aspects of the new Local OneBox and the Google test of the Sources display first spotted by Cyrus Shepard.
Google has been on a tear of late in local to gather photos and display them on your Place page. One assumes that this effort is on going in other topical areas as well.
Google is currently showing similar results to the Sources test for bricks and mortar businesses and geographical points of interest…
Two weeks ago there were numerous reports of new pop-ups on the Places page to ascertain from visitors the accuracy of a business location, the website associated with the listing, and the quality of included photos. Shortly there after it became obvious that Google was starting to once again actively allowing users to edit every Places attribute of claimed & unclaimed listings via community edit feature…
I was surprised to learn that Dependable Locksmith, raided in late 2009 by the Feds and sued by the attorney general in Missouri earlier that year , was still in business and still using their “standard” business model of bait and switch. It does not speak well of our regulatory or legal environment that known crooks and charlatans with a profile like theirs could continue to operate in the exact same way…
What does it mean to call Google Plus an Identity Service? Might that have implications for how web pages might be ranked by Google? If we believe that Google might start incorporating authority signals into those rankings, it very well could.
At the Edinburgh Intl TV Festival on August 28th, 2011 at a [...]…
(Cross-posted on the Inside Search blog and the Public Policy blog)
Earlier today, President Obama spoke about the importance of helping returning military veterans find work. Thousands of businesses have committed to hiring military veterans and families and as part of this nationwide effort, starting today, job seekers can visit the National Resource Directory (NRD) to search more than 500,000 job openings from employers around the country…
Timing is everything. On Monday, I was asked if I would give a presentation at the Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh, NC on November 15th and 16th on an advanced SEO topic. I thought about it, and agreed, and decided to give a presentation on how social media has been transforming search on Tuesday [...]…
Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.
If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics (the only time my favorite sport, cricket, was played)…
Noran El-Shinnawy, Director of Marketing at BoostCTR and Associate Instructor of the Master Certification Conversion Optimization course at MarketMotive, is one awesomely outspoken marketer. I first met Noran at last year’s Search Engine Strategies Chicago after her solo presentation on Social Media Metrics, during which she berated all those self-professed “Social Media Experts” (or worse… “Social Media Gurus”… *shudder*) clogging up on the online marketing industry…
Today, I am presenting at the seventh GetListed.org Local University in Ellicottville, NY. in cooperation with Google, Bing and range of local sponsors. Some of you I know and the others I hope to personally meet. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask any questions that come to mind or to just introduce yourself.
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…
Working in the SEO industry for quite a few years now I’ve talked to a lot of small business owners frustrated by their experiences working with SEO companies. Small business SEO is very different to doing SEO for larger brands and we’ve always focused on working with larger businesses at Branded3.
This week I’m pleased to say that we are launching a new business called Baby SEO to service smaller businesses with respect and deliver the sort of good, honest service that small business owners expect from an SEO company…
There is an interesting post in the Grocer today about how Waitrose is struggling with SEO after a £10m website relaunch earlier this year.
“Waitrose.com is so technically hampered it is going to have a problem ranking for anything – it’s terrible,” said Juliette van Rooyen, a consultant from digital consultancy Reform, after analysing SEO measures determining the visibility of Waitrose, Ocado and the big four’s websites to search engines such as Google…
Sometimes when you search at Google, you might not find any results that you find interesting and may search again using a somewhat similar query. Chances are that you don’t want to see the same sites or pages all over again. A newly granted patent from Google describes how the search engine might demote [...]…
We all intuitively know that individuals' search skills are evolving and improving. We're reconditioning ourselves to become better searchers based on what we've learned from previous search failures.
We're also learning how we can identify those companies with "questionable intent", by looking at reviews of a company. In doing so, many businesses are failing to keep up with the times, and adapt what they optimize their sites for within search engines…
Related posts:
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The pumpkins are carved, the spiderwebs are hanging,
Kids and their pets are door-to-door banging,
Witches on their brooms and owls on their perches,
Let’s take a look at some Halloween searches.
Halloween searches are some of our favorite trends to look at all year. Using Insights for Search and some internal data, we took a peek at which costumes and candies are on top in the United States.
This year seems to be about the battle of the birds…
testing 123
Related posts:
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You go to a site that you’ve enjoyed and bookmarked sometime in the past but haven’t visited in a while, and it’s changed. The topics it discusses are different, or the writing style isn’t quite the same, or it suddenly has links within its content to commercial pages that it probably wouldn’t have linked [...]…
Bryan Eisenberg is, in the world of online marketing, generally a man who needs no introduction. Co-author of bestselling books, frequent keynote speaker and session sequencer at an array of conferences, co-founder of this, advisory board member of that, authority and pioneer in persona marketing, conversion rate optimization, persuasion architecture and more. Wait, this is turning into an introduction…
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 question that I’m sometimes asked by people is about whether or not they should choose a domain name that includes the name of their business or brand, or if they should use keywords within a domain name to make it easier for them to rank for those keywords in Google and the other [...]…
You might say Simon Heseltine, Director in charge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at AOL Inc., knows a thing or two about organic search. In addition to managing all organic search and training across AOL and Huffington Post Media Group properties, he and his team do SEO consulting for the AOL team across the pond in the United Kingdom. He’s been at the forefront on development and implementation of successful organic and social strategies for an array of clients spanning a variety of verticals…
When search engines return web pages in search results in response to a query, most people assume that the pages being show are the ones that a search engine has decided are the “best” pages in response to their search terms. But what does the word “best” mean in that context? The search engines [...]…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
