Recent content by Damian Rollison

Different story with SOCi. We don't have that requirement for managing Yelp listings or reviews.

I know Synup is the topic of the thread, but I wanted to offer a little more context on the Yelp discussion. Yelp does not require a direct paid relationship when working SOCi, under the terms of our relationship as a listing management partner. (I can't speak to the terms other Yelp partners...

I've pointedly and specifically been told by the GMB team that there is absolutely no way to lock a listing so that it cannot be edited, with one exception. The Google team has elected to lock a small number of listings for very public and prominent locations, in order to prevent them from being...

How is this different from the item Joy reported on back in August? New Services Options in the Google My Business Dashboard - Local Search Forum

Is what Austin just reported happening for others as well? I was immediately able to reproduce it, not just for "massage kenosha wi" but for another random search I entered, "physicians tehachapi ca." Go to the local finder and move the map slightly. Rankings change. Try it again, nothing happens.

We started seeing this yesterday: Google Launches New Settings for Hotel Amenities

Interesting. We just tried to reproduce this and can't. Some time ago our Google support told us this was unlikely to be added for hotels. But who knows, maybe you're seeing a test?

Incidentally, we're also noticing that client locations where fake reviews have been removed are now displaying incorrect review counts. Google tells us the removal of the fake reviews may have caused a latency in review counts and that everything should return to normal in a few days.

Correction -- is addressing the problem. Some of our listings still have a few fake reviews but fewer than yesterday.

Thank you @keyserholiday ! I can confirm that the fake reviews have been removed from many of our client listings. We're continuing to check but it appears Google has addressed the problem. Now here's hoping they introduce a failsafe that prevents accounts from posting massive numbers of reviews.

@keyserholiday We have a client affected by this as well. Are you trying to build a list of fake reviewer names? I ask because we'd like to scour all of our accounts to see if we can track down any further examples that haven't been noticed yet by us or the client.

These are great. I have a Street Fight column on this very topic: "How Not to Respond to Reviews: 10 Common Pitfalls." But the examples you guys came up with are way funnier than mine.

Thanks for posting on this topic, Linda. It certainly caught my ear as well, in particular because I have heard more than one local SEO offer the recommendation that businesses should seriously consider opening an office or moving to the center of their city in order to improve ranking. It...

Hi Russ, It's not easy to give a definitive answer to your questions. As Nyagoslav said quite correctly, there are companies with the resources of a Google and then there are others that are much smaller. To Google I would add Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, YP, and a few others where there is (or should...

Hi, this is Damian from UBL. I wanted to respond to these ultimately very helpful comments on our submission process and the state of the union for local search publishers in general. At UBL we are very sensitive to issues such as Russ describes, and we work carefully with publishers to prevent...