Archive for January, 2012

SBSM Flashback: January 2011

Filed in Link Roundups by Matt McGee on January 18, 2012 0 Comments
SBSM Flashback: January 2011

For those of you who are new SBSM readers & subscribers, here’s a list of noteworthy posts you probably missed from one year ago. I try to put together a post like this each month to introduce new readers to old content that might be worth reading.

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Google Emails To Let Me Know My Wife’s Merged Listing Will Be Merged Again

Filed in Google, Local Search by Matt McGee on January 16, 2012 14 Comments
Google Emails To Let Me Know My Wife’s Merged Listing Will Be Merged Again

I think it’s great that Google is trying to improve customer service. In trying to fix my wife’s current merged listing cluster****, they’ve sent me more emails than I could’ve ever imagined. Yay Google! Except the last email they sent wasn’t so good. Yesterday, Google emailed me to let me know that they’re going to […]

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Foursquare: The Web’s Newest Local Search Engine (But There’s One Big Question)

Filed in Local Search by Matt McGee on January 13, 2012 8 Comments
Foursquare: The Web’s Newest Local Search Engine (But There’s One Big Question)

If you’re a local business owner, Foursquare isn’t a novelty anymore. Oh, sure, the points and badges and the game elements are still there, but Foursquare became a full-fledged local search engine yesterday with some nifty search and filtering options thanks to what’s now a whopping 1.5 billion check-ins. The new toy can be found […]

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Google Places History, From 2004 to Today

Filed in Local Search by Matt McGee on January 10, 2012 0 Comments
Google Places History, From 2004 to Today

I know I posted about this earlier on Search Engine Land, but it bears repeating here in the event that anyone reading this doesn’t also read SEL (why not?). Read and bookmark this: A Brief History of Google Places I’m not sure what’s “brief” about it, but David Mihm has put together a great reference […]

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Google’s [Not Provided]: Assessing 2.5 Months of Analytics Damage

Filed in Google, MY BEST POSTS, SEO by Matt McGee on January 9, 2012 25 Comments
Google’s [Not Provided]: Assessing 2.5 Months of Analytics Damage

The dust has settled a bit on Google’s decision to stop passing keyword referral data from searchers that are logged in to their Google accounts and using encrypted search by default. That began in mid-October and then ramped up a couple weeks later. At first, [not provided] represented a small percentage of overall traffic to […]

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WordPress, Technorati and … Where’d All The Blog Directories Go?

Filed in Blogging, Directories by Matt McGee on January 5, 2012 17 Comments
WordPress, Technorati and … Where’d All The Blog Directories Go?

Where’d all the good blog directories go? I came to wonder about that via a somewhat winding path, so follow along with me if you would, please. A couple nights ago, I was installing a new self-hosted WordPress blog. One of the many settings you’re asked to configure involves search engine (and web) spiders and […]

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