Local Search

Lost Places Reviews with Transition to +1 Business Pages

Did you lose Google Places business reviews during the transition to the business +1 pages? If so you are screwed. And that is directly from the horses mouth (Google). Places has always been a second rate product from Google. They do not offer support at all. They mess up listings. They generally ignore businesses requests to improve the product, etc. Google ignoring Places never made sense to me. Google makes plenty of money off of the Places ads and Adwords Express and it keeps visitors on Google instead of clicking through to the listing company’s actual website. Unfortunately, as bad as Google treated Places pages they made it even worse with the transition to the +1 Pages. Many companies lost thousands of reviews during the transition to the blended Places and +1 display. These were not fake reviews or trumpted…
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The Three Rs of Reviews in Local Search

By Todd Atkins For local search, reviews are still king. It used to be quantity of reviews was more important than the sentiment of those reviews. Google has gotten a little smarter about how it judges reviews in local search. We started seeing this with the Venice update about a month or so ago. Yesterday, Google announced the demise of Google Places and how its successor Google+ Business Pages are taking over. We predicted this integration back in November when Google first rolled out Google+ Pages. Anyways, back to reviews. Quantity does matter, but quality is starting to trump it. There is a difference between quality and sentiment. The sentiment of the review (number of stars) doesn’t seem to have as big of an effect as the three R’s. This should help mitigate competitors writing fake negative reviews. Reviews for…
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Google Local Search Results – New Google Patent Integrates whois data

Google received a nice patent for utilizing whois information to augment local search results. Another indicator that Google does look at whois information for search rankings. We’ve discussed in a previous SEO blog post the benefit of registering your domain name for an extended period. This is an extension of that. Make sure whois is legit and matches your google local results. Another reason not to use the privacy services. Below is the full text of the local search result patent: “A method includes receiving a search query from a user and generating search results based on the search query. The method may also include providing the search results and information identifying at least one of a telephone number or an address associated with a first one of the search results to the user. The method may further include providing…
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