We’ve talked before about the failure of Google’s Local Business Center to provide a way for service-based and home-based businesses to use Google Maps without … well, cheating. A couple weeks ago at SMX West , Google’s Carter Maslan was asked about solving this problem and he said … “I don’t want to say ‘hold your breath,’ but ‘almost…

Thanks to a good question on Twitter from John McPhee , I discovered this week that Google is crawling business profiles on Foursquare and using them as citations in Google Maps. They’re not, however, crawling Gowalla business profiles. More on that below, along with some bugs in how Google is using Foursquare as a citation source. First, let’s look…

ClickZ is running an article today about Yelp’s current legal troubles. I’m quoted in the article (at the end) and I come across as a staunch defender of Yelp. While I do admire the loyalty they’ve built up amongst users, I’m actually more in the middle than the article portrays. I really believe Yelp needs to improve its overall…

Does the world need another local business/reviews site? AT&T seems to think so. Forbes says the company is planning to launch a Yelp competitor soon at Buzz.com . If nothing else, it’ll have a great domain name going for it. But, a great domain or not, is any new site going to come along and even put a dent…

click hereto retweet Anyone who pours sweat and tears into their blog, and actually succeeds in getting new readers as we discussed last week, should make sure it’s not all wasted by finding ways to get those readers back! You can only do so much to build a solid, consistent and growing readership by constantly chasing new readers – you…

Tri-Cities, Washington — where I live — is generally about two years behind the rest of the country when it comes to adopting whatever’s hot. I know this from spending close to 10 years as a web designer and marketer in this area, and from living here for more than 15 years. So it wasn’t much of a surprise…

Mike Blumenthal is running an annual series of posts that involves a variety of people writing guest articles about important things that happened in local search during the previous year. I sent in a short piece a few days ago as my contribution, but the series started today with an excellent set of information and links about local search…

Google has published a new set of guidelines for local businesses using the Local Business Center — guidelines that continue to get more specific to counter the very specific ways small businesses spammers try to bend or completely get around the rules. In a nutshell, there are three completely new guidelines that deal with spam/attempts to take advantage of…

My wife went on a kitchen cleaning binge yesterday. When I came home from some errand-running, three yellow pages books were sitting on my office desk. So I asked what’s up. “You’re the local SEO guy,” she said. “Do we even need these anymore?” I thought about it for 30 seconds and decided no, we don’t need these anymore…

Due to my recent overload of travel, I’m not at the SMX East conference this week in New York City. Yes, I’m skipping the conference put on by the people who pay me to write for Search Engine Land. (That was a fun email to send. “Dear Danny, sorry but I can’t help out this year at one of…