Search Engine Tigers

A letter from Google regarding changes with Google Base and support for submitting business locations…

Hello, 

At this time, we're transferring support of Business Locations
bulk uploads from your Google Base account to your Google Local
Business Center account. If you are currently submitting Business
Locations bulk uploads for inclusion in Google Maps via Google
Base, please begin submitting your updated Business Locations bulk
uploads via the Google Local Business Center found here: 

http://www.google.com/local/add/uploadFeed 

If you've encountered problems submitting your Business Locations
bulk upload to your Google Base account over the last few weeks,
we recommend that you resubmit your Business Locations bulk upload
using the Google Local Business Center. Google Base will no longer
support the "Business Locations" item type. Instead, please begin
to access and manage your information through your Google Local
Business Center account. You'll be able to access this account
using the same email login and password you used for Google Base. 

This change will allow you to submit new locations individually
and in the feed format, all from one centralized account. There
will be no need to access your Google Base account for business
locations purposes going forward. 

Please know this was a recent change and we apologize for any
inconvenience this change may cause you. Google Base is a beta
product, which means it is constantly changing and developing. We
are confident this will provide you with a more comprehensive user
experience. 

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Looking to find a new domain, but are having trouble because all the good ones are gone? Well, there’s a tool out there that lets you enter words and it’ll check all combinations, along with combinations including synonyms, to see what’s available. You can ask it to combine on 2 or 3 letter terms, and ask for just the .com, or to make sure that the .com, .net and .org are available for a particular combination. The name of this tool? BustaName. Thanks to Ben for the tip.

A couple of weeks ago I, and every other columnist for Search Engine Land was asked to write a local or mobile article for their special series of ‘Local Search Week‘ and ‘Mobile Search Week‘. I had an idea as to what to write, and did the initial investigation, but just didn’t have the time to write anything up, so instead of it being over there, it’s now over here.I decided to take a look at the various mapping systems out there, and see if they really were all created equally. I did a number of direction requests, and compared the results. For most of the searches the directions were fairly similar, with the ‘Whitehouse to Disneyland’ trip providing the biggest differences, with Yahoo taking a northerly route to start, while MSN & Google headed South. However, at the end of the trip, Yahoo & Google went the same way, while MSN went their own route. (The order in the image below is Yahoo, Google, MSN).

So what about timing? Obviously the title of this post gives you an idea of how those results came out. For virtually every trip that I put into all Yahoo, Google, MSN & Mapquest, Yahoo came back with the fastest time to the destination. The only divergence from that pattern was the Whitehouse to Disneyland trip, where MSN beat Yahoo into second place. N.B. MSN could not find a route from Anchorage, AK to Miami, FL.

So, if you’re going to travel from Anchorage to Miami, Yahoo will save you 4 hours over mapquest (while traveling only 67 fewer miles), even traveling from Scotland to the South of England will save you 2 hours over Google maps, despite traveling 2 more miles…

Sometimes Reputation Management issues can’t be helped, you may have disgruntled former employees, former customers with a real or perceived issue, or just someone who enjoys talking down other companies / competitors. But what about self inflicted wounds? Well, as the BBC has recently found out, something as innocent as a little kitten can cause a big reputation management issue. Children’s program ‘Blue Peter’ ran a online vote to name the newest pet on the show, a cute fluffy little kitten. The winner of the vote was ‘Cookie’. The winner that they announced on the show was ‘Socks’, which was chosen by the production team as a ‘more suitable’ name. Naturally, the news leaked that Socks was not the name chosen, and the show has now received a black eye. Already you can see that a search for ‘Blue Peter’ in Google has the news about the deceptive vote in first position.

So what’s the moral of this story? Well, you should be as honest as you can be in your dealings with your customers / donators / audience, for if you’re not, at some point the truth is going to come out, and you’re going to have much more of a reputation management issue than if you’d gone down the right path in the first place.

One year ago today, the first article on this site went live – location based geotargeting – since then there’s been another 164 posts that have gone up on this site. So, since this is the one year anniversary of this site, I thought I’d throw some stats up.

Top 3 posts (traffic):

1. Save Me Bloglines – June 2007
2. Poor SEO, Great Content – August 2007
3. Scraping SEMPO for Keywords – August 2007

Traffic Sources:

1. Referrers – 61%
2. Engines – 20%
3. Direct Traffic – 19%

Top Referrers:

1. StumbleUpon
2. DooleysFurniture
3. Sphinn

Top Keywords

1. Simon Heseltine
2. Search Engine Tigers
3. Nick Stamoulis

So, literally 5 days after joining the local gym, I got a phone call from Kaylee over at LookSmart to let me know that I’d won a BowFlex in a drawing at SES. This follows on from the Palm T|X that I won at SES-NY last year. Not bad. It kind of makes the phone calls and emails that I’ve received from the places I didn’t win at, worth it.

Now, when at the iPod and iPhone contest people going to be calling me to ask about shipping my winnings?

It’s offline advertising, but since it was on the way to SES San Jose (just outside Stanford University), and it was amusing, I thought I’d share…

While doing a search to determine differences in SERPs due to personalization, I noticed that when I was logged in and receiving personalized results there were PPC ads displayed. When I logged out and performed the same search, no PPC ads.  At least there was the same number of organic results…