Author: andrewsho

I always get them confused… Now that Marissa Mayer is taking the helm at Yahoo!, I wonder if this means Yahoo Local is going to get some much-needed attention. A few years ago, an insider told me that Yahoo Local got nine million daily visits just from Google. That number has almost certainly declined, but I’ve got to believe the service still gets substantial traffic from search engines, third party sites and Yahoo properties. There’s so much potential there and…

  image from sodahead   16 years ago I participated in something called “Project Ohio” – the partnership between NBC and Microsoft to create the awesomely named MSNBC. Today NBC is buying full control of MSNBC from Microsoft and is changing MSNBC.com to NBCNews.com – only they forgot to tell the SEO guy. Go to www.msnbc.com and you get 301 redirected to www.msnbc.msn.com – all good – and then you get 302 redirected to www.nbcnews.com. Oops! So now when you…

Don’t block Googlebot or Bingbot from crawling your site in your robots.txt file Don’t serve 403 response codes to a browser when the user-agent = Googlebot or Bingbot Check out #1 Search Engine Ranking Factor: SEO QA And every little thing gonna be alright…

This past February, in  The Non-Place-Place Use Case I posted about how Google was delisting businesses that did not service customers at their locations but had not requested their addresses be hidden on Google Maps.  Mike, Miriam and others chimed in on how lame this was.   Today, I got this email about this “recent” update: Guess they were busy with the Glasses thing…

From the get-go, Yelp has always been a spammer’s paradise.  Within a day or two of Yelp launching member profile photos, Jeremy Stoppleman emailed me asking me to stop spamming Yelp simply because I used another member’s photo for my own to test out the functionality. I take great pride in having beem Yelp Spammer Zero. Since then, as Yelp has grown in popularity and importance, the number of businesses and their agents trying to manipulate the service has gone…

Chuck Skoda on Apple Passbook from his post, A Week With iOS6: Passbook is a bit of a strange one. To me, it’s this years Newsstand. Newsstand still sits empty on my last page of apps. There isn’t a single publication I’ve seen that has enticed me to pull the trigger on a subscription, and I haven’t seen any free content worth reading either. I can’t see Passbook being useful to me in the short term. Scott Forstall billed it as…

Didn’t want to get anything done today anyhow. David Mihm’s latest edition of the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey is now out. As tradition dictates, I will summarize the findings and then send you over to David’s blog for the full Monty: Top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors for 2012: Physical Address in City of Search on Place Page Proper Category Associations on Place Page Proximity of Address to Centroid on Place Page Domain Authority of Website Quantity of Structured Citations…

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to support The Oatmeal with targeted anchor text about how some crap site called FunnyJunk is ripping off his content. Reminds me of my buds at Sam Schwartz. And don’t forget to donate to Operation BearLove.

Looks like you may need to start brushing up on your 3D Local SEO skills: source: TheVerge Seriously, between Apple Passbook and the upcoming Apple Maps, Apple/iOS stands to become a major force in local search (as if it weren’t already). Get ready for an onslaught of bullshit Apple Maps Ranking Factors posts like this one coming soon to a SEO blog near you. BTW, of all the days to come out with a Local Search SEL post on local…

or something like that.  I am not even 100% sure what it is yet other than a place to store all of your tickets and promotions, but I am pretty sure it becomes the de facto local payments system for anyone with an iPhone. And speaking of payments, check out Your guide to SEPA Direct Debit  (German version)