Google Local Business Center awaiting updates
Mike was fast with his catch on the LBC awaiting an update! I wonder if it has something to do with his previous post that has drawn some attention.
Anyway, here’s the screenshot!
Update: as Maps Guide Brian posted in the Google Groups the Local Business Center will also undergo some maintenance the 6th of November.
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Slideshare as a citation source
Some of us might know Slideshare, the online platform where you can store your presentation slides to share with the rest of the world. It appears that this website is a valuable source for local citation building. The real value, or the amount of it that might affect your ranking could vary. If your presentation on Slideshare is doing well, even the better. This all may sound a bit fuzzy, but I will try and explain with the following example:
I noticed our Local Business listing for our company was taken down. So I checked the Local Business center and found out it was not suspended, not inactive, it was just nowhere to be found in the search results.
The regular keyphrase I use to see if our business is still there is the company name. Whereas we normally we would be in pole position in the 10pack, we were now in 8th, but with a listing that derived its source from the Slideshare website.
Curious of course, I went to the Slideshare website where one of our presentations from SMX Madrid was listed. One of the slides had the company name and phone numbers listed and apparently was being indexed due to the transcript of the presentation.
The data of the company was blended with the results of Slideshare, causing the URL of Slideshare.net to appear. The information taken from the Slideshare transcript also appeared in the ‘webpages’ tab as one of the citation sources.
So I’m wondering, what is the real value of citation sources? Is it the domain that counts or just the per-page popularity? What is exactly needed to be a citation? In our case it was just the company name and phone number that was enough for Google to blend all our information in ‘the cluster’ with our listing. Please let us know your thoughts or experiences in the comment section!
PS: after entering the Local Business Center and updating our listing with basically no major changes it appeared back, where it should be; on top of the 10pack.
Local Search with Google Earth on the iPhone!
Google just released one of their most popular products, Google Earth, with over 400 million downloads for the iPhone! It’s a free download from the iTunes App store and it also features the My Location feature. Local Search information with Google Earth right on your iPhone! The iPhone seems to be a perfect device for navigating Google Earth as well using the tilt/gyro sensors.
There is a button in the application that will find businesses directly located near you. Even the more reason for Small Business Owners to get their business listed in the Local Business Center.
Remember, the iphone is a very popular phone so plenty of opportunities/new clients waiting to find your business!
Download the application in the App store.
Video after the break!
Read more
Quality Guidelines and reinclusion for Google Maps
Some technical difficulties with his blog doesn’t stop Mike to get up early today and post his very interesting findings on an update in the Google Maps Help Center. The Google Maps Help Center now contains some guidelines for your business inclusion and also, what to do when you got kicked out of Google Maps for spamming. This report from Google corresponds well with my previous post about Google tightening its submission policies.
You can find the guidelines by clicking on the following link:
Google Help Center Guidelines for Local Business Center Submissions
Honestly, I still find the guidelines a bit vague, taken into account previous statements;
“be as descriptive if you can for your business in your business title’ doesn’t really correspond with “Represent your business as it appears in real life”. Or is this just my point of view?
Can I use “Italian Ice cream and Cappuccino Bar Bella Napoli” or should it just say “Bella Napoli” because I registered with chamber of commerce with that name?
In my opinion it should add up to the user experience and thus allowing the first one.
In the Help Center, Google is now also referring to the Google Maps group for Business Owners where they can report abuse of the Quality Guidelines.
Local Business Center Oddities
It looks like the Local Business Center is tightening its submission policies and some oddities are starting to appear. This is the list so far:
First, the use of too many capitals is being prohibited. The following screenshot shows an example of use of roman numbers and its being classified as ‘overuse’ of capitals. Sounds to me like they are trying to prevent people from leaving on their CAPS LOCK (shoutness level).
Also, the use of too many punctuations is being prohibited, since recently, as we could also tell from the increasing number of posts about this in the google maps group.
I submitted split hours, using the bulk-upload feature. Now when editing that listing manually it starts complaining about overlapping hours.
All days have split hours, except Saturday, where only mornings are available. So Google puts the after hours in 12:00AM till 12:00AM. Trying to save these, will result in the following message (the message about repeated punctuation applies to the previous example):
Another one; interesting one actually! Is this a translation error or does this mean that Google is working on something in the future to enable verification by email? Notice the term ‘correo electrónico’ which is Spanish for email. Clicking it however, results in a regular mail verification method.
Have you been noticing other oddities or strange behavior of the Local Business Center? Please let us know in the comments!
The research Quest
I was searching for some documentation about on site embedded Google Maps implementations and geocoding features of the Google Maps API. Many times, I have to remember myself, to look into the google code pages. Because they turn out to be a very helpful resource of information. So, with some help, I ran across this dynamical spreadsheat containing lots of information about availability of Google Maps services per country, including geocoding service, quality of maptiles, availability of driving directions / itinerary, Local Business Center availability and Language availability.
I haven’t really checked if all information is up to date, but it seems that most of it is. (let me know if you notice some flaws, like the availability of Ireland for example. )
So my tip for the day is; check out the Google Code pages; often, developers know more about the capabilities of a service and it helps you to sell a better product.
Fix incorrect marker option is back!
Word has that Google put back the ‘fix incorrect marker location’. Google Maps Guide Sirene posted this in the Google groups.
So it’s not necessary anymore to use the trick I used for you US users to change the interface/engine by switching back to a European one, where we are still awaiting the updates.
Screen shot below shows the button back in action in the ‘new’ / US interface of the Local Business Center
Thanks Map Guides! And oh yeah
Thanks for letting us know what things make the LBC a better place!
You can read those here!
What should Google do?
What should Google do to make their Google Maps product more successful?
First off all, in the ‘link’ feature, to send people links of google maps, they should provide you with some sort of tinyURL that is descriptive. Everywhere you see Google asking you to be clear as possible, using good structured URL formats, etc, and they just provide you with a URL that contains at least a couple of & parameters, fuzzying coordinates, etc. I read this idea also somewhere in the Google groups.
Second, I have to agree with Matt McGee and Mike B. that if Google would like to promote the use of Geositemaps, KML, and more stuff that common people or small business owners don’t understand they should think of better ways on how to do this.
For example, in the Local Business Center they could provide an export function of your current business listings, (approved, flagged, filter if necessary!) to KML! with automatic geo-encoding, maybe 1 or 2 images to embed in the KML or which further details per listing from the feed and information that is already there! And why not provide your KML in the webmaster central without using a sitemap?
Third,
everything that is still listed here; my previous post about updates I would like to see in the LBC or Google Maps.
Please share your thoughts or name a few things of what you think Google should do to improve Google Maps or make it more successful for business owners!
Local SEO in Travel
Yesterday I was reading the Google Maps help groups for business owners, and a question was raised if it was Okay with Google to submit (self contained) accommodations to the Local Business Center.
we’re an accommodation
provider with over 150 self contained holiday listings. We’d like each
of these properties to appear on the local business center maps but I
want to be sure we aren’t spamming.
I think the question was a good one, just to be sure that you are not spamming Google Maps. Maps Guide Jen responded that you are free to go as long as the accommodations all have a physical address, andyou are the representative. Although they are not being validated by regular mail. They do go through the stages of bulk upload though, which means that the listings are not activated right away, but it might take up to several weeks.
Although this might have been obvious, for me this was always a shady grey area, because if you are a representative, you are not the actual business owner but a caretaker of multiple individual listings.
So this opens up opportunities for travel agencies, rental apartments, holiday housing providers, ferienwohnungen, bed & breakfasts, etc. who are representing these business locations and want to be visibile in the local search engines and thus increasing traffic.
If you upload your data to Google Maps using the LBC and want to include a URL to that listing, make sure you deeplink it to the property URL! It looks less like spam, and hey, it increases the conversion rate!
The definitive guide on using KML for SEO
Most of you in the Local SEO business have probably heard of KML, but consider it a buzzword, Chinese or something they don’t want to get their hands dirty on.
But what is KML and how can it help you in your local SEO strategy? Recently Eric Enge from StoneTemple consulting interviewed Google’s Director of product management for Google Local, Carter Maslan, where he said that having a KML available in a geositemap that is authenticated with Google will automatically result in authentication of your KML file with Google and thus act as a trusted source for your business locations.
So I decided to write a tutorial to make it all a bit more easier to understand, and especially, giving step by step instructions on how to implement the KML.
If you would like to know more about using KML implementation for Local Search Engine Optimization you can head on and read my tutorial! You can find it here :
The definitive guide on using KML for SEO
If you think something is missing, have feedback or suggestions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!
