Taylor Hatmaker on Yelp’s Q4 loss of $5.3 million: Yelp should own local. But it doesn’t. The company, founded in the mobile dark age of 2004, is being assaulted on some major fronts. There’s Foursquare of course, but the biggest threat is Facebook’s renewed interest in local, which the company will be building out in the coming months in the form of a feature called “Nearby.” While I agree that services like Facebook and Foursquare are threats to Yelp,…
Just caught Greg’s piece on Facebook’s new mobile local search feature: Facebook Gets Into Local Search with Facebook Nearby for iOS & Android. While I don’t expect Facebook Nearby to stay ad-free forever, with the entry of Facebook Nearby and Apple Maps, both ad-free, I’d say 2012 has been the most interesting year in the Local Search biz since Google Places rolled out. Many in the industry would argue that the ads do help people find the right businesses and help…
A friend who is a former spook told me how he once smuggled an Arab man out of the Middle East. “I dressed him in short pants.” “Why?” I asked. “Because Arab men never wear shorts. People tend to only see what you tell them to see.” Which brings me to the following response I got from a client developer when I pointed out to their in-house SEO that one of their templates was linking internally with 302s, which is…
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Low-T & Low-O www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive A new client has been seriously dinged by Google because their site is littered with SPAM. This is quite common for UGC sites where the U is a perv merchant or a purveyor of high quality fake medical products. Even sites that do not have UGC can be hacked and infected with this kind of crap.…
Sorry for the dramatic headline – I am doing some research on how SEO/SEM agencies service SMBs and I am looking to do brief interviews with agencies that handle between 20-100ish SMB clients (or more if you want). If you fit the bill and are interested, please ping me via my contact form or via Twitter. Thanks for the great response to this. We are full-up on interviews right now, but we may need more in the future, so feel…
I am at BIA Kelsey’s ILM West show today and tomorrow. Be sure to catch my panel: The Pros & Cons of SEO Outsourcing with Will Scott of SearchInfluence and Tim Judd of Elocallisting.com. If you’re around and want to catch up, please hunt me down. I am writing this from the lobby of the Hyatt Century Plaza if you are milling about in search of a couch and wifi.
Mike Blumenthal’s instant classic Google Local: Train Wreck at the Junction has spawned a lively Google Plus thread where various Localistas have been wringing their hands as to why oh why can’t Google stop screwing SMBs. While I am in agreement that Google Plus Place Local Multi Merge for Business Dashboardgate has been absolutely no fun, to me it seems like just the latest in an ongoing saga of companies trying to serve SMBs and falling short. While Google and…
This just left on How To Add a Business To Internet Yellow Pages Listings For Free: My name is Carol and my ex-boyfriend dumped me 4 months ago after I caught him of having an affair with someone else and insulting him. I want him back in my life but he refuse to have any contact with me. I was so confuse and don’t know what to do, so I visited the internet for help and I saw a testimony of…
A little Friday rant on the Apple Maps blog entitled Why Do Map Services Not Give a Shit About Businesses? Typical ignorant American that I am, I had never used Nokia’s maps. Then when they made their big, in-your-face-Apple/Google announcement, I had to check it out. The first thing I noticed was that there was almost no effort to communicate to businesses how to work with the service. In fact, the UI was so lacking in that regard, that in…
One of the more popular questions right? While I am sure the Googlers have been trying to figure out how Tweets can be a proxy for links, even though Matt Cutts claims Google is “leery” of social signals, I thought the social media reactions to yesterday’s post about Groupon SEO could illustrate Twitter’s SEO effect nicely. According to the Twitter widget on the post, it has received 86 RTs thus far. Not bad. But since Google doesn’t have access to the…