Google Places For Business Gets Its Own iPhone App For Managing Listings
Local business owners have a new tool for managing their Google Places For Business listing: a dedicated app that works on the iPhone and iPod Touch. There’s no official announcement that I can find about the app, and as best I can tell, the iClarified blog was first to report on it. The…
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Local Weekend Update
What Else is New Dept: There is a new bug with the Google Report A Problem for SABs: If a user selects the report a problem link via Maps or G+ Local they get a “This page won’t load…We’ve tried everything” message. At least its cute. Although that sad face icon is eerily reminiscent of my first […]
Google Maps Quality Calls: Improving But Still Confusing
Adrew Forster of Adster Creative recently received and recorded a call from the Google Maps listing quality team. The calls are improving in quality over previous calls that we have heard. For example the caller clearly introduced herself. A definite improvement. But the call was still confusing. The intent of the call was not clear […]
Google Category Tool Updated To Include new Places for Business Dashboard Categories
We have upgraded the Google Places for Business Category tool and added our categories from the recently released, new Google Places for Business Dashboard. The new list is designated as Google English (US) (PfB) to distinguish it from the list for the old and still predominant dashboard. Note that the new categories themselves DO NOT have […]
Google Maps 1.1 for iPhone Not Well Received
Early last month, Google released a 1.1 upgrade to their iPhone mapping product that was faster, integrated Google contacts and included more countries. Apparently though the upgrade has not gone over well with users as the bad reviews seem to be flowing into the App store at a significant clip. Since its release 5 weeks […]
Authorship Brownouts Due to “FaceRank”?
Several months ago my author photo stopped showing on my articles in the Google search results. I double checked all of my settings several times and they appeared correct. I didn’t really have time to fool with it until the end of last month when I reached out to Matt McGee, AJ Kohn and Aaron […]
Google Announces Availability of a Google+ Widget for New Dashboard
Google has just updated their dashboard post in the forum detailing the new Places for Business Dashboard with the following one button upgrade of your listing to the fully social G+ page. Update: Alex Cordes of LocalSEOupdate.com uncovered an interesting tidbit. If you have a non verified local G+ Page at the same email as […]
SABS with Social Local G+ Page – Hide Your Address Now
The process of merging a social G+ Page with a non social G+ Page (AKA a G+ local listing, a Place Page, a non merged G+ page for local) was never intended for use by service area businesses (SABs in Googletalk) that were supposed to hide their address. That didn’t stop them and many of […]
Google Notes That Recent Review Take Downs Might Be Reversed
Jade noted in the forums that: Just letting you know that we’ve found a technical issue last week with reviews where some were incorrectly taken down. We’re working on fixing the issue, so sit tight! This was in response to the spate of reports of reviews being taken down last week in what appeared like […]
New Google For Business Dashboard Now Available For All New Users Nationwide
Google has just notified me that the new Google For Business Dashboard is now available to ALL NEW dashboard users in the United States. Although I am not yet seeing it on the accounts that I manage. I missed the new dashboard users part and mistakenly thought it was all users. Mia Culpa… its late here. […]
Local Weekend Update
Several items of interest. Dates & Scores No Longer Showing on Google Reviews. Chris Campbell on Twitter and Jack Thornburg on G+ pinged me that date and scores on individual reviews on the business G+ Page had stopped showing. It had been reported on April 4th in the forums. Google has said that they are looking […]
Google Local: Are Mobile Signals Actively used in Ranking Local Results?
David Mihm just did a great Whiteboard Friday on the evolution of the local ranking algo. In the article he speculated about the future of local signals: And just to speculate a little bit, because I love to speculate, going forward I also think we’re going to see Google potentially integrating some offline information into […]
New Google Places for Business: Articles From Around the Web
Late yesterday, Google started rolling out the updated Places for Business dashboard to new claimants and they have simultaneously redirected some dashboard accounts to the new interface. Here are some additional articles from around the web about the change: More details about the improved look and feel of Google Places for Business – Joel Headley (must […]
Good luck Marissa – Marissa Mayer to head up Yahoo
I don’t think this is a move anyone saw – however Marissa Mayer is to be the next CEO of Yahoo, becoming in the process one of the most important people in Silicon Valley. Google’s 20th employee, and their first female engineer – Marissa was one of the people responsible for much of the early […]