Author: andrewsho

Today Greg Sterling asked What’s Going On At CityGrid?: “Here’s my paraphrase of some of the things I was told: CityGrid and Citysearch are struggling (to retain and deliver value to advertisers) Citysearch was characterized to me as having lost so much momentum that it was effectively “dead” CityGrid and associated properties (InsiderPages, Citysearch, Urbanspoon) are being reorganized, with an announcement to come soon I was also told that IAC had tried unsuccessfully to sell CityGrid (possibly Citysearch as well)…

Today Yext announced Sync, a service that lets you sync a business’ location data to Facebook along with “enhanced” data such as menus, offers, photos and status updates.  While there are plenty of social media management tools that allow you to control content on a Facebook Page,  the two big differences with Yext’s service are that it also allows you to share this info across Yext’s Powerlistings network of 50 or so local search sites like Yelp, YP.com, etc. and…

Danny Sullivan just tweeted that Google is screwing up royally when it comes to searches for “dana point jet ski”: Good job, Google. You ignore HTML title tag, make up your own title instead. Result: misname a harbor as business twitter.com/dannysullivan/… — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 30, 2013 I thought it would be interesting to see if we can figure out why this is happening and whose screw-up it really is.  Here are some of the smoking guns: Dana Point…

enlarge If you don’t have a good SEO QA process, make sure you let the SEO guy know when you push new stuff live.  You’re likely to break something.  Better yet, let him know before you push it live.

Dr. Pete Myers’ post, Rel=Confused? Answers to Your Rel=Canonical Questions, has reminded me that I have had a bee in my bonnet about the rel=canonical tag for a while that I’ve been meaning to get off my chest on these hallowed pages.  In short, the rel=canonical tag sucks. You can’t always tell if they are working Contrary to what Dr. Pete says, they still often show up in the index after they have been crawled, which tends to freak clients out after…

Ok I know Facebook is a big-ass brand that doesn’t need your stinking organic traffic, but if you’re going to have a big press conference about your amazing new mobile strategy, don’t you think the in-house SEO person would at least do the minimum to make sure that someone searching Google would be able to easily find Facebook’s official explanation of Facebook Home? I just searched Google for “facebook home” and here’s what I got: Now at least the ppc…

Mike Blumenthal has some nice LocalSEOGuide bait today on print yellow pages usage trends by advertisers entitled “Annual Print YP Death Watch”: “In many categories the ads are for national players. In florists for example there are 2.5 pages and only 1/8 of one page covers truly local florists….The print YP are no longer a local advertising medium catering to local business. It is clear that what is left of the print yellow pages has been taken over by regional…

You may have seen the news earlier this week that Greg Sterling and I have determined that bad business listing data may be costing US businesses $10 billion. To provide more context for that number, Yext has just published the first issue of the Yext Quarterly (aka “YQ”), subtitled “The State of Location”.  The report was produced by myself and Greg for Yext to provide local marketers with  information on critical issues related to business location data, some local search marketing…

Greg Sterling & I were asked by Yext to figure out how the cost of erroneous business listings data.  The answer: $10 Billion, maybe more.  Greg has the full story. Yext internal data indicate that 14% of business listings are missing from online databases and sites and as much as 43% of listings contain errors of some kind (bad address, name, phone number). Based on our survey, this bad data causes lots of people to not use the business they…

Image lifted from DeviantArt.com Too much business Leads to having to hire more people in a competitive industry where there are not enough skilled providers and a lot of churn from people jumping around trying to make more $ So you end up hiring inexperienced people and trying to train them on a “SEO system” So now you’ve got a lot more overhead and your investors are impatient so you take any business that walks in the door and throw…