Maybe it's my bias as a longtime fan/practitioner of local search and SEO. Or maybe it's because I'm mentioned as one of the sources/contributors. But more likely it's just that this is an important search reference document, and that's why I think that anyone interested or involved in local search should know about it. David Mihm has published A Brief History of Google Places -- an excellent historical document that covers back to 2004 when Google launched what was then called "Google Local," all the way through the "Google Maps" days and now up to the current Google Places era. Imp [...]

Related Topics: Google: Maps & Local | Google: Place Pages

Today Mike Blumenthal of Blumenthals.com posted about what appears to be a new addition to Google's local results.  A specific query for "transmission servicing lexington ky" displayed the normal Google Places listings, with one exception: The grey icon is displayed next to a specific places results.  However, when clicked, the user is taken to the following Google+ only results page: The surprising thing about the above listing is that the link goes directly to a personal account, not an actual Google+ page.  We had extreme difficulty replicating this on any other queries in d [...]

Related Topics: Google: Google+ | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Place Pages | Top News

Local searchers and local businesses will see a fairly substantially different Place Page the next time they're poking around Google Maps/Places. The company announced a new look Thursday and promises more changes to come. The new layout of Place Pages puts a heavy emphasis on reviews. More specifically, it emphasizes reviews from Google users and no longer shows review content from third party sites. (Google had issues with both Yelp and TripAdvisor over review snippets last year, you may recall.) Rather than showing external reviews, the new Place Page only links to third party sites [...]

Related Topics: Google: Maps & Local | Google: Place Pages | Top News

Carter Maslan has been the patient and good-natured face of Google Maps and Places at innumerable conferences and events over the past several years. He's endured a regular onslaught of questions about missing features and local SEO frustrations surrounding Google's increasingly important suite of local products. Now he's leaving Google. I got word of this yesterday from a Google partner and then I later confirmed it in an email exchange with Maslan himself. He's leaving the company on good terms and said he "loved" his work at Google. However he has something else he wants to pursue. [...]

Related Topics: Google: Employees | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Place Pages

The panelists at last week's "HardCore Local SEO" panel at SMX Advanced, Mike Ramsey of Nifty Marketing, Will Scott of Search Influence and David Mihm of GetListed, presented some excellent data on various tactical approaches to improving Google Place Page rankings. For today's column, I thought it would be helpful to excerpt some of the more interesting ideas they presented. I was particularly intrigued by Mike Ramsey's presentation on research he had done where he compared 28 listings that ranked in the top 7 results for some local queries to 28 listings that did not rank as well. Mike s [...]

Related Topics: Google: Place Pages | Local Search | SEO: Local