Thomson Local – Express Way into Google Local Search & Invitation to Cold Calling

Thomson Local & Google Local Search

If your product or services is targeted at a particular locality, having it appear in Google local business result listing is very important to driving high quality targeted organic traffic to your site. Aside from the usual algorithm Google uses to rank what site is it displays before which, it displays about 6-7 local businesses right at the top of search engine result page, giving such businesses and significant exposure.
There are a number of ways to get your business listed in Google Local Business Result, one is to submit your site to Google places, a second one which most SEO seem to argue gives you better ranking in Google Local Business Result is to have you business listed on Thomson Local. This way is not unlike the way Google populates its own directory by importing DMOZ directory.

Google partnership with Thomson Local is an excellent way of verifying business’s locality and Thomson Local, a traditional business directory which is not particularly a highly sought after directory to have business listed in suddenly became “sexy” due to the fact that it is now a back door into Google Local listing.

For the aforementioned reason, this author bough several local Thomson Local directory listing to get some of his client’s site ranked better in their Locally Business Listing. No sooner did the listing appear in Thomson Local did the cold calling starts from various sources from Thomson competitor trying to persuade you to list on their directory also to energy companies wanting you to switch to them, this bring home some of the reasons many Internet business tends to avoid having their business listed in traditional print based directory.

Thomson Local may get your into Google Local Business Listing but it brings you a considerable number of unwanted calls as well.

Google PageRank update 02/04/2010

Google PageRank update 02/04/2010

Webmasters (some webmasters I should say) are usually obsessed with Google PageRank update, the hardcore obsessed one not only keep a chart of the previous updates and the expected date of the next but they discuss it at lent at UK webmaster forum and other forums. As early as the middle of March speculation about the next PR update started, well, its here now. The update started rolling out from various Google data centre from the 2nd of April and it is still on going as this blog is posted.

The last Google PageRank update was on the 2nd of January, making it exactly three months between updates. You can continue discussion about Google PR update at UK webmaster forum or you can comment on this blog page.

Google admitted its Buzz service was not tested enough and they regret this

Google Buzz is a Gmail integrated service, launched February 9^th, that lets to people the possibility to post and share content, read and comment buddies’ posts etc.

Since their launch, Google was hardly criticized for personal information disclosure. If you are not so familiarized with this service, see what the deal is: Google Buzz friends’ circle creator makes public your list with most emailed persons unless you change your settings. That means Google allows others Buzz’ users to see to whom you email more often.

The decision was based on the idea of providing a greater user experience to people using that service, but it seems it was a bad step taken by the company while revealing maybe connections between journalist and “rats”, business people, even affairs with other women.

Google admitted that they have not done this the good way so improvements are to be done, but all that they wanted was to create an easily accessible social network for Gmail users. More than that, they also consider offering to people that do not use Gmail the option to join a separate from Gmail website.

As you might know, Google services are tested by Google Trusted Tester program, a network created by friends and families of employees that gain access to products before being launched and than send feedback to Google. It seems that Buzz was not tested by this program, the reasons being unknown.

A Google representative admitted that the company apologizes for making this step without a deeper testing of this service and also apologizes for the worry created about this issue.

We should keep an eye on Google’s next moves while those can decide if the Buzz will be a success or a failure in Google’s plans for a bigger piece of social networking.

Here are some fixes announced to be done in a short time:

-         Buzz will only make suggestions who could be a part from your friends’ circle

-         Easier way to disable Buzz

-         guarantee that accounts will not auto-connect with Picasa albums

-         guarantee that accounts will not auto-connect with items stored in Google Reader

-         an improved “preferences” menu

It seems that these improvements are up to be released this week, as the work involved in this issue is at higher levels.

Google incorporates real-time data into SERPs

Google real-time web goes live

Real-time search also called real-time-web results Google has been trying for some time is now being incorporated into their SERPs. This mean in addition to the indexed pages it usually displays on its search result pages, it will also display information from news organisations, blogs, forums, Twitter and other trusted sites as soon as such information is published. The real-time web feature will also index status updates from Facebook, public information from MySpace and tweets.

Google claimed that it is the first search engine to integrate real-time web into its result pages, the feature will also be available in PDA such as iPhone and Android powered PDAs.

The real-time data will be displayed in a constantly updating stream within the regular Google search engine result pages.

Bing.com went offline for 30 minutes

Microsoft’s Bing search engine went offline due to update error

Things are getting very exciting at Bing, the Microsoft search site which aims to be number 2 in the search engine market within the next few years has been experiencing many new tweaks and updates recently, one such update went wrong on December the 3rd when when Bing disappeared from the web completely, visitors to Bing.com got an error message or are not able to find Bing.com at all.

Microsoft apologised to Bing users through a statement that blames the outage was caused by configuration changes made to Bing during testing. The outage and measures taking to address it was clarified better on Bing blog where Microsoft spokes person said “as soon as the issue was detected, changes that led to it was rolled back, which caused Bing to work normally again. This took about 30 minutes to fix from when the error was detected. Bing are looking into how the outage happened and what to do to prevent it happening again.

While Bing was offline, the engineers working on it used Twitter to update users following Bing on twitter. Though the search function of Bing was completely unavailable, the map section of the soon to be number 2 search engine was working fine.

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