google places

Dealers Receive Google Places Notice

Some Dealers have mentioned that they are receiving a notice about their Google Places.

See below for details:

Google Places Team have recently been sending out letters about updating information on Google Maps and Places. This is causing a stir, so let me advise you to be calm.

The notices are part of a transition that Google has in mind that will eventually transform what we know as Google Places to something better. Google now has a documented escalation process and trouble ticket system that is fixing Google Places issues in a timely manner.

In fact, Google has been listening to dealers and in the coming months you will see that Google does want businesses to control and leverage their business pages. The visibility, traffic, and advertising opportunities with Google Places FAR outweighs some of the pain that dealers experience as Google Places is transformed.

via DealerRefresh

Google Buys Zagat to Boost Local Reviews

Google’s announcement to acquire Zagat shows a major shift in the local/review space. Most interesting is that Zagat is a content company Google usually only curates information rather than owning it outright.

Google has toyed with local ratings, search and reviews for quite some time, but it appears the the company is now very serious after an acquisition of ratings-mogul Zagat. It’s not a terribly surprising move, when you look at Google’s history with local, ratings and the like, but it’s probably not the one that we thought the company would make. In fact, this might have very little to do with local, from a macro scale.

More details from TheNextWeb.

Google City Sites May Compete With Yelp, Online Yellow Pages

Google is really hitting local hard looks to be very interesting.

Yesterday David Mihm was pointing out on Twitter that Google had created a number of new city sites or portals. They appear to be the phoenix rising out of the ashes of Hotpot. As Iwrote yesterday on my own blog, this is Google’s effort to bring a number of initiatives together in a single place: Places Pages, Offers, Mobile, Events and promotion of its ads/services to local business owners.

via: Search Engine Land