TripAdvisor Astroturfing Hand Slapping
One of my favorite topics when it comes to review sites is astroturfing.* What is Astroturfing? If you’re not familiar, astroturfing is when you write fake reviews for a company – either positive reviews for your own, or negative ones for a competitor. The term came about because you’re faking [...]
The 1 Place Google Places Still Shows Outside Reviews
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile or have spoken to me ever, you probably know one thing about me: I’m obsessed (cursed?) with the Pirates. If you know a second thing, it’s how strongly I feel all businesses need to understand how their online reputation can either help [...]
Google Places Goes It Alone (with Reviews) – UPDATED
If you weren’t paying attention last week you missed that Google Places has dropped 3rd party review ratings and stars from its pages. That meant for many companies going from a dozen reviews to 0-1 or from hundreds to a handful. Which makes this a big deal. But what exactly [...]
Facebook Recommendations: What You Need to Know
The US has long been wise to be fearful of and prevent business monopolies whenever feasible. With competition comes awesomeness. Google+ comes out (regardless of my feelings about it) and facebook speeds up a few announcements of its own like its Skype partnership for video chatting and today’s release of [...]
Google’s +1 for AdWords Ads Misses the Point
We’ve had clients asking us about our thoughts regarding Google’s recent roll-out of its +1 button, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here. This post will focus mostly on +1 for AdWords; you can bug Paul if you’d like to get his thoughts on Google +1 for SEO. Update: [...]
Interview with Cars.com on Dealer Ratings: Part 2
On Wednesday, we posted the first half of an interview with Nick Hummer of Cars.com about how their new dealer ratings & review system is coming along. Here for your reading pleasure is the second half of our discussion. JS: One of the things I thought was interesting is that [...]
Interview with Cars.com on New Dealer Review System: Part 1
As we mentioned before, Cars.com switched over to a new dealers review and rating system this past March, which is currently in an opt-in stage. We wanted to get an update on how things were going so far, so we reached out to Nick Hummer, their product manager who’s leading [...]
Bing Giving More Prominence to Local Review Site Ratings
I really wasn’t looking to do a second post today, but saw something on a bing search that caught my eye: they’re now putting logos for various review sites along with a more prominent rating grade on the sides. Take a look here (click to enlarge): And it’s not just [...]
A Chink in Google’s Safe Search Armor + Happy St. Patty’s!
I wanted to throw up a quick “Happy St. Patty’s” here on the Found blog and thought it might be fun to see who’s running AdWords ads on some holiday related terms. Nothing too interesting when you do a search on St. Patty’s Day: all t-shirts, which you might expect. [...]
Cars.com Gets in on Review Game: Will Post Customer Dealer Reviews
The importance and prevalence of online reviews is ever increasing; that’s why we discuss customer reviews so much here. That’s why it was no surprise to see this article from Ward’s Dealer Business about Cars.com entering into the auto dealers review space. They had long been allowing customers to review [...]
How to Lose Guaranteed Business Fast: Negative Reviews on Google Places
I only have a few rules in life. These include: The Golden Rule Never wear white after Labor Day. When I get an email that starts off addressing me as “the Local Search guru,” it’s getting published on the Found Blog. In that vein, off we go with last night’s [...]
Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings are a Scam: Just Ask Google
As someone who sells search engine marketing services for a living, nothing bugs me more than snake oil salesmen. Promising the sky and talking spaghetti, they end up turning off companies forever to search. While scams on paid search are out there, SEO scams are numerous and seemingly ubiquitous. My [...]
YouTube for Truck Driver Recruitment: Sexist or Smart? (Or Both?)
The trucking industry was not one of the first verticals to get behind internet marketing, but they’re starting to make up for it in a big way. It’s one that we follow closely as we have several clients and do speaking engagements for groups and conferences in this niche. That’s [...]
FOUND! GOOGLE ADWORDS AUDIT
