Google recently posted a blog article raving about how it tackled webspam in 2015. The numbers were quite impressive. The webspam team handed out more than 4.3 million manual penalties last year, which must have been pretty labor-intensive. If only…
I noticed today that Google started displaying the neighborhood a business is in beside their primary category on Google in the knowledge panel. There is no field for this in Google My Business and Google is pulling this data from…
I regularly hear things in the Local SEO world that many people believe, but which are completely false. I wanted to put some of these myths to rest by listing out the top 9 Local SEO myths that I run…
Has your business listing in Google been suspended? Not sure what happened? I see threads over at the Google My Business forum all the time from panicked business owners or SEOs who have logged into Google My Business to see…
I used to think that locksmithing was the industry with the highest percentage of fake local listings on Google. I’m starting to think I was wrong. It all started a few weeks ago, when I was talking to Dev Basu…
Update: Google re-added these guidelines a couple weeks later (April 1, 2016) Local SEOs rejoiced the day Google came up with the rule for solo-practitioners that indicated locations with only one public-facing professional could combine the listing for the organization and…
I’ve heard many complaints in the last couple years from business owners who have issues with their listings showing up as “Permanently Closed” in the search results on Google. Usually, it happens to businesses who have relocated, and their customers…
Google has just recently launched a page in the help center that lists all the product updates for Google My Business (GMB) arranged by month and year. It's a great way to keep track of what is currently going on…
I often hear people in the Local SEO industry complain about Google My Business (GMB) phone support. I would sit there dreading the calls before I made them, knowing that I'd have to repeat myself several times, wait on hold, and possibly…
Another Google MapMaker Regional Lead was talking with me about a page for a business that recently came unverified and vanished from the search results. You can see that the Google+ page is unverified because it lost its verified checkmark…
This is a feature I've been asking for a lot. You can now see if a store is located inside a mall when you search on Google. You'll see in the Knowledge Panel it shows the mall the store is…
After I posted this article, the messaging on Google actually changed. Barry Schwartz captured a before/after screenshot in his Search Engine Land article. Bill Slawski also posted about this and concluded "Do click-throughs determine whether certain pages appear in search results?…