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Local Business Ads to be syndicated to Maps API Sites

August 2, 2007

These third-party websites use the Google Maps API, which allows them to embed customizable Google Maps within their site. Google technology will only display your clients’ ads when they’re related to the surrounding content of the webpage. As with all content targeted ads, your clients pay only when someone clicks through to the website.

From a Google newsletter.

It’s not clear if you have Local Business Ads if you will choose to syndicate these ads to Google mashups, or if they will be syndicated if that campaign has the ‘content network’ turned on.

It is clear that Google is pushing LBAs and trying to find more inventory for them (which I applaud), such as showing LBAs on Google Earth.

I hope that you can have the option to syndicate LBAs to maps mashup API sites without showing them on the general content network. That would give the advertisers more control, while receiving primarily local based inventory.

Google Upgrades Local Business Center

June 22, 2007

There are a few people in the industry who I’ve not really had a chance to talk to, and amazingly, Matt is one of them. We’ve been at the same conferences several times, yet never quite hooked up for some good conversation.

Matt has a fantastic article on the upgrades to the LBC. And since he beat me to writing about it, I’ll just let you follow the link to LBC Upgrade.

He’s also a Search Engine Land columnist (like myself) and wrote a nice piece today about the Top 20 Don’ts in SEO.

What the colors mean in Google Local Traffic View

February 28, 2007

Google recently caught up with other local search engines by showing traffic on local.google.com .

Here’s the key to what the colors mean:

• Green: more than 50 miles per hour
• Yellow: 25 – 50 miles per hour
• Red: less than 25 miles per hour
• Gray: no data available

Google Maps Now Showing Subway Icons

February 11, 2007

Google maps has recently started showing subway stops on maps. It seems much more prominent to see these icons on the directions page than on the general maps page.

However, if you were traveling to Chicago, this map would be quite confusing.

First off, several of those metros don’t connect. While the pins mark the stations, Chicago has several different trains that run downtown (named ‘the el’) and one often has to switch trains (and know where to transfer) to find a destination.

The second aspect is that mapping software doesn’t seem to take under ground vs above ground into determining directions. I will admit that the above is probably a trick query, it’s for Intelligentsia Coffee’s Pedway location (the pedway is an underground walkway that connects several parts of downtown Chicago. There’s no way to drive to this location, but you’d never know it from the map’s directions.

Overall, it’s probably a precursor of things to come. It would be very useful to be able to use a search engine’s mapping site to find public transportation directions. New York and Chicago can be difficult cities to navigate by car. It’s often faster and easier (once one understands the systems) to use public transportation. However, easy access to that information can sometimes be difficult.

Transitchicago.com is useful for finding door to door public transportation directions. However, if you’re trying to find a restaurant, read reviews, see what’s close, and then want directions to that restaurant, a search engine is the more logical choice to find that information.

Hopefully, we can look forward to finding public transportation directions on maps.google.com sometime in the near future. It would be an extremely useful tool.

Hijacking Google Local Listings

February 8, 2007

SEO Roundtable has a post on hijacking Google Local Listings.

Hijacking local business listings isn’t new news, I wrote about hijacking Yahoo Local listings in December 2005.

This is the first case where I’ve heard of Google Listings being hijacked; however.

The search engines need to do a better job of letting local  businesses control their data.

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