Small Business Shift

There is a hilarious/horrifying listing on Fiverr.com, where an offer is being made to remove competitor’s listings from Google Places for $5. It says: Is your competition above you on Google places listings? Are you sitting “C” when you wanna be “A” Listed? We will get your competitors Google places listing bombed faster than a […]

I’ve written previously about the benefits of a business blog, and really believe in that article. But I recently across a piece titled Why Content Marketing is Not For You at the UK-based company Base One. It lists four reasons that marketing by creating content (such as blogging) may not be right for some companies. The […]

When you search on Google for something that may be local (a restaurant, dentist, or plumber, for instance), the search engine returns a combination of regular and local results. About a year ago, these were always clearly separate, but have since become less easily distinguished. What’s interesting is that it wasn’t just the display that […]

I wrote last week about Google’s new hotel finder. The company continues to experiment with hotels – Mike Blumenthal has an image of hotel ads in the main search results that include a date selector, hotel prices, and the ability to book a room straight off the ads. It looks very similar to the hotel […]

The New York Times has recently reported on Google’s acquisition of The Dealmap. Their quote from Google says: “We are impressed with what the Dealmap team has accomplished and excited to welcome them to Google,” Google said in an e-mailed statement to DealBook. “We’ve been thrilled with the early success of our commerce offerings, and […]

Techcrunch has an article about a new $10 million funding round for Yext. They are taking the money to help grow their PowerListings service. Previously, Yext had been focused on a pay-per-call offering (read my discussion of Yext’s challenges with that service). PowerListings is already up and running but Yext wants to expand it: With the new […]

The online marketing company Blueglass has an excellent post about Facebook’s Edgerank. Edgerank determines how likely a piece of content is to appear in a Facebook user’s news feed. One of the things discussed in the article is that Pages with fewer fans often have higher Edgerank, likely because their fans may be more engaged. This […]

Google is on a roll with announcements lately, and today added the experimental Hotel Finder. The announcement says: Finding the right hotel can make or break your vacation, so with this in mind, we’re introducing Hotel Finder, a new experimental search tool specifically designed to help you find that perfect hotel. Google Hotel Finder makes […]

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has some interesting examples of shares from Google+ showing up in the search results. He said this was displayed at the bottom of the first results page for “cars.” It only displayed when he was logged in: When hovering over the “Ford Motor Company” link, it displayed a note […]

I posted yesterday that Google released an update to Google Maps for Android. What struck me about the update was that the very first bullet in their list of features for the app is the ability to upload photos for Places. This, coming right after the desktop Google Places update that also prioritized an “upload […]