Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’

Local Search News Podcast - Episode 1

Monday, April 6th, 2009

So we finally got around to putting together a podcast for Local Search News! It has been in the works for some time but it finally is here. We will be trying to put one out every week from now on. In the first episode I had Mike Belasco join me to discuss recent happenings in the local search world and a couple seo tips as well.

Here is a brief overview of what we disucssed and some screen shots for you reference of what we are talking about in the podcast:

Google Onebox Change
Google no longer requires a geographic modifier inserted into the a users search for some broad phrases and will show a Onebox result based on the users location when the search is conducted. We had noticed an up tick in referrals from Google with no geographic modifiers and wrote an article on it here.

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Google Doesn’t Know How To Work Adwords

We then ventured a little off subject and discusses how Google is now placing Adwords for local searches as seen below:
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But when you click on the ad they take you to a search for “pizza” but it is for San Francisco. They probably should have a lower quality score because of this :)

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Microsoft’s New Onebox
After Google we discussed that Live.com now has a Map next to their local map and pretty much received no recognition for it as we talked about it here .
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Twitter Mobile
Mike Belasco pointed out that on the Twitter mobile profiles have dofollow links.
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We talked about much more. Listed to the podcast for much more. Have an idea you want talked about or an idea for the Podcast? Drop us a line in the comments and let us know.

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Posted in Podcast | 4 Comments »

Microsoft Joins the Onebox Bandwagon

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

It was not too long ago that Google released their first version of the Onebox. It included three business listings with a map to the left and was triggered only when a local search was conducted. Since then, Yahoo! has updated their version of local blended listings, called Yahoo! Shortcuts, also containing a map to the left of the business listings, very similar to Google. Then Google updated their Onebox once again, adding ten business listings instead of three.

It looks like Microsoft has now thrown their hat in the ring with an update in the look of their blended local results in the SERPs. While Microsoft still has a way to go, hopefully this ongoing trend will continue as it is an indication the search engines are focusing more resources on local searches.

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Below you can see the newly updated UI for when a local search is conducted on Live.com or MSN.com

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I mentioned earlier that Microsoft still had a long ways to go. This is evident because they are still relying on users to go that extra step and add a state abbreviation to the search query to include local results. In the above example, I searched for “plumber in murrieta ca” but when I search for simply “plumber in murrieta”, without the state abbreviation, I didn’t get the same local results, in fact, I didn’t get any.

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In my opinion, Microsoft should focus more on recognizing local searches rather than updating their UI. Any improvement is better than none, however. Hopefully this will get all this cleared up soon, for the sake of the MSN searching population.

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Posted in Microsoft | 2 Comments »