Category: Yelp

Google has long been trying to compete with Yelp on the local review front, however, getting community involvement has always seemed like a challenge for them. After Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman’s recent embarrassing exchange with the affable Mike Blumenthal on Twitter, I switched off of Yelp and took my talents to GMB, and I have to say, they are not killing it on the Local Guide front. As a Local Guide, $GOOG will sometimes ask you specific questions about a place…

Just posted this on the Apple Maps Marketing blog, but it’s too big a deal to not put here as well: At the launch of Apple Maps Connect, we submitted an inquiry about submitting a client with a few hundred locations to Apple Maps.  Today we received the following email: “Thank you for your recent inquiry and interest in publishing your business locations via our new Business Portal. At this time, we are only accepting bulk submissions from businesses with at…

Mike Blumenthal just posed a question about this on G+ and I thought it was worthy of posting here.  The TL;DR answer is: On G+, Yelp and most other review sites, the reviewer typically owns the content of the review (this is to shield the review sites from liability) while the review sites own the right to do whatever they want with the content. Third parties typically cannot use the reviews on their own services without consent from either the…

This post was originally published on Search Engine Land, but I didn’t like how they rewrote the title so here’s the director’s cut: To:           Local Directories From:      Google Re:           Local Search Rankings Hey guys… You may have noticed that over the past year, a lot of the organic traffic to your sites has been… well, we guess the right word is “tanking.” As you know, it is our stated goal…

According to some data I uncovered it appears that Apple Maps Trusts Yelp More Than Business Listing Aggregators: Just as Google Local SEO relies on NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number) consistency to help Google understand and rank (or not rank) your business, Apple Maps has its own flavor of NAP inconsistencies gumming up the works. Often businesses whose data is not up to date at all of the business listing aggregators Apple Maps uses, can find their business displayed incorrectly on…

  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,…

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…

I thought it would be interesting to review the Quantcast data for the local-oriented sites in Quantcast’s Top 100 to see if anything has changed (of course take this data with a grain of salt) since the Google Farmer Update: Update: Some readers pointed out the non-Quantified sites I used were not showing the right data so I took down charts for Yellowpages.com, Weather.com, Yelp, Craigslist & Weatherbug.  In fact I have been told by Yellowpages.com that their traffic when…

We’re back at C3 and starting out with “A Conversation With the Networks”: Doug Kilponen, SVP Biz Dev, Merchant Circle John Kim, VP, Products, Pelago Sumir Meghani, Director BD, Groupon Jed Nachman, VP Sales, Yelp Kim – If you can create content and connect with other people, it’s social media Meghani – Groupon has two types of social interactions – between businesses and consumers (the deal) and between consumers (getting each other to hit the tipping point for the deal).…

BreakThrough Radio, an enterprising music site in New York, sent over this woman-on-the-street video interviewing consumers and businesses about how social media impacts their decisions on where to eat, shop, etc.