If You Don’t Want High Ranking Local Results

We all struggle to achieve high rankings in Google local. It is not clear exactly how hard these businesses have worked to achieve these high rankings.

With Google Local’s ability to parse sentiment, their ability to create business categories on the fly and their desire to serve man you often will find local results that you didn’t quite bargain for. In my research looking for review snippets I was exploring searches in NYC looking for extremes. I managed to get side tracked when I came upon the results for these local searches.

I have caputured the results in an animated slideshow for your viewing ease. One wonders just what Brooklyn based Sal The Plumber did to have Google designate him as the worse plumber in New York City (and a One Box no less):

Small Business Influencer Awards

 

I was recently honored to have been nominated for the 2011 Small Business Influencer award in the guru category. It is an effort by Smallbiztrends.com to recognize those “organizations and people who have made a significant impact on the North American small business market”.  The awards will identify the Top 100 influencers and are decided 40% by a popular vote and 60% by the judges. In the popular voting you can vote for a candidate once every 24 hours.

Whenever I receive this sort of nomination an internal dialog always takes place that goes something like… “ooh, cool… I would like to win ah but I can’t win, oh this is just a popularity contest but there are others more deserving than I … “. By the time the internal chatter has ceased the contest is over and I place 75th or so.

In this contest, since a voter can vote once a day for a given individual, a contestant needs a very large family, a very involved mother, a great bot network or a very supportive industry. I don’t posses a large family, a living mother nor a bot network but do feel that option four (industry support) holds lots of potential.

And this time I have decided to be more proactive, more assertive and more involved and not let my internal dialog slow me down… so I am suggesting that as an industry we get together and we Vote early, Vote often and Vote for ….. Lisa Barone.

Why pimp for Lisa Barone and not myself you ask? Well besides the fact that she has an Italian last name and HAS to have a larger family and active parents, I really think that she deserves the support of our industry for her tireless reporting of industry events, her relentless and smb focused writing and her voice. An opinionated, funny, off beat voice that is a voice of reason and straight talk in an industry that has its share of the opposite. She has done us all a favor and I think it is time to pay her back.

So Vote early, Vote often and Vote for ….. Lisa Barone. Not once but every day for the next 22…spread the word.

Bing Maps: Magic Shop Front Door

MagicShop FrontDoor Beta (BING & OSM)

Something to do when your really bored: move address locations for Bing and contribute to OpenStreetMap (OSM)

MagicShop FrontDoor Beta

What’s this? Every time you help Frontdoor correct an address point to the front door you’re improving the local search results in Bing Maps. You’re also contributing address position data under the ODbL to the OpenStreetMap project.

No more details….

Map and Fix some Addresses
http://frontdoor.cloudapp.net/

Source:
http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2011/06/06/microsoft-magicshop-frontdoor-improved-address-locations-released-to-openstreetmap/