Author: andrewsho

Shameless traffic driver.  I know.  Sorry.

“Nostalgia means the pain from an old wound…” – Don Draper When Google’s new Local Carousel came to a town near you a couple of weeks ago, I immediately envisioned the Don Drapers of local search in conference rooms around the country dramatically presenting their initial impressions. Of course at the end, instead of Duck saying “Good luck at your next meeting,” he said “Good luck at your next job.” My initial impression was that the imagery and prominence of…

UPDATE: This just in from Chris Andrews, one of the top contributors to the Google News Help Forum “Google News is working on a system-wide fix for the ‘not in the Google News database‘ error-message error. Nothing is being done on an individual site basis, so publishers do not need to post their sites in the Google News Help Forum. It is already a known issue that is being worked on. Also, this error is not having an effect on…

Aaron Bradley dropping some Local knowledge, along with a lot of other knowledge, in his fantastic post about the Semantic Web: “…search is no longer about words, but about the things to which the words on a web page describe and make reference…” “Why is this important?  It’s important because when Google receives a user query it’s increasingly not trying to provide a match for the query keywords, but (informed, whenever it’s possible for them to do, by the context…

I tend to get a lot of calls from start-ups trying to go the small business SEO agency reseller route to get their services in the hands of SMBs.  Often they are looking for feedback on their service, introductions to potential resellers, or a SEO strategy to get in front of potential customers.  I have had this conversation so often in the past month, that I figured I would save everyone some time and give you my initial feedback on…

WASHINGTON – Following revelations that the U.S. government’s PRISM program has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, President Obama admitted that Google’s policy of hiding keywords in Google Analytics was the deciding factor in moving ahead with the controversial program. “Not being able to see our keywords created a grave threat to our national security,” President Obama said today in…

Since Penguin 2.0 hit a couple of weeks ago, a number of clients have received a large volume of requests to remove links from their sites that goes something like this: “I recently received notice from Google that my website has been assessed a penalty after they “detected unnatural links” pointing to my website http://www.spamdawber.com/.  Can you please remove the links to my site from the following URLs: http://www.clientsite.com/spammy-profile If the link doesn’t get removed, we are going to have to…

Yesterday I talked about my initial thoughts on Google’s new Local Business Data Highlighter.  Tyler Bell of Factual was quick to point out an important point: [View the story “Cheeky Google” on Storify]If you want to have the best chance of ranking for local queries in Google, you should definitely use the tools they give you – provided they don’t break something (jury’s still out on that).  But Tyler’s point is spot-on.  This tool has two purposes: Make it easier…

Google’s new Data Highlighter for Local Businesses is definitely worth checking out for anyone trying to goose their local rankings.  I have found it to be a bit buggy and it’s a new tool, so proceed with caution.  Here are some basics on how to use it along with some tricks I have figured out thus far. Start Highlighting Go to the Optimization section of GWT and click on “Data Highlighter”. Don’t watch the video, just proceed to the blue…

And in other breaking CitySearch news, Darren Waddell of RadiusIntel just sent me this awesome Google Alert he received this morning: It links to this article from 2007. For all of you marketers recommending that your clients use Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying, be sure to include that it works better if you use it in conjunction with a time machine, or better yet…