Bing now offers a new Webmaster function called Disavow Links that might help ease your pain and let you cut those binding, negative SEO ties. According to Bing, you can “use the Disavow links tool to submit page, folder, or domain URLs that may contain links to your site that seem “unnatural” or appear to be from spammy or low quality sites.” You can add shady domains, directories, and pages, letting Bing know that you don’t want to be associated with them.

Will it fix things?

Probably not completely. First of all, Bing’s Disavow Links tool doesn’t really have anything to do with Google, and you may have noticed that Google is a pretty big player when it comes to search. Second, while disavowing links will help Bing understand your intent, the official word is that it won’t drastically boost your rankings in Bing search results. So if you’re only concerned with search engine rank, this may not help you. In my opinion, though, it can’t hurt to identify and clean up bad links.

So?

Overall, I think it’s a pretty awesome concept and it’s a tool that I will definitely be exploring more in depth. It’ll be interesting to see if Google will offer something similar anytime soon, especially if their tool does have an effect on rank. After all, it may have been their idea in the first place…

Kristen Watson Perko

Kristen Watson Perko is a Digital Marketing Manager at Direct Online Marketing.

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JS: One of the things I thought was interesting is that you have a partnership with Bazaarvoice, is that correct?

Nick: Yes.

JS: Have they had to scrub much so far in terms of profanity or some of those other things or have they not really had to remove many reviews so far?

Nick: The amount of reviews that they are scrubbing hasn’t changed much since we’ve launched. I looked today and I think we’re at about 14% that are being kicked back. I’m actually pretty happy with that because it shows that yes, we are finding things that we don’t want and are rejecting them but it’s not been overwhelmingly so.

JS: I would imagine, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes, are you kind of learning as you go along with seeing the kickbacks and changing your stance on things and modifying what you want to see and what you don’t want to see or are you like, ‘here are our guidelines and here’s what we’re sticking with?’

Nick: We’ve definitely been tweaking some things and I think one of the big things we’ve seen, and Bazaarvoice has been great – they do a lot of fantastic moderation, but one of the things that we’ve seen is that the dealer business is so different from a lot of other industries that we have found that we have to tweak some things over time, but more along the lines of really understanding that here is the type of experience that would lead me, as a car buyer, to leave a review.

So, I think one of the best examples that I’ve seen is that on most review sites, when you’re reviewing a product – a physical product – you don’t want to include that I got something that would indicate that I got X number of dollars off the deal because you’re reviewing the store or the deal. And what we’ve been seeing is we get a pretty substantial number of reviews that call out specific things like that. It’s one of those gray areas that we’re taking a look and trying to figure out what makes the most sense in our world because for the most part I say that we probably all know someone who has gone to a dealership and got a fantastic deal and they immediately came back and said, ‘oh my gosh, you should shop at this store because they gave me $400 off’ or whatever it was. We want to make sure that we encourage people to leave those types of reviews while also not setting a certain expectation that it’s always going to be done this exact way for every person who comes into that store.

JS: Ruins their leverage to be able to do those types of things. Do you have a breakdown of what percentage have been kicked out for being spam, you know some evil person in my industry automated that’s trying to build links vs completely flaming vs….

Nick: I don’t have anything that I can quote off the top of my head but I do know that I’ve looked pretty closely and I really haven’t seen very much spam at this point mostly it’s about specific content rather than the same review being posted over and over again by the same person …that type of stuff.

JS: Do you have stuff in place to kick stuff out for dealers trying to game the system, not for negative reviews, but trying to get people to leave good, fake astroturf?

Nick: Absolutely. It’s the first thing that brought up when we talk to site users or the dealers. And it goes both ways. It’s this fear that:

1. How do you make sure that a dealer is not leaving a lot of negative reviews, followed by ‘How do I make sure that the dealer down the road isn’t coming in each morning and telling his salespeople that they’re going to leave five glowing reviews today just to build up our volume.’ So there are a couple different things that we do and you’ll see this when you look at the screen shot [see below], we do ask whenever someone leaves a review, the last question that we ask is a check a box to certify that they’re not employed by a dealership. I realize that’s not going to catch everyone, but we do want to make sure that right off the bat that we are asking the question to make sure that people understand that if you are a dealer, leaving a review, we are going to pay very, very close attention to it and you really shouldn’t be using it for that.

JS: Because you have a little bit of a hammer that you could bring down on someone for doing that.

Nick: Exactly. It gives us the ability to come back and say, ‘you know what, you certify that you weren’t a dealership, but your IP address indicates that you are so we’re going to do something with this.’

The other thing that we do is we require that each and every review goes through a validation process by the person who wrote it before we even look at it. The example that I use, is that if I’m at work and I’m bored and I am going to go write 20 bogus reviews, I’m going to get 20 different emails, and I have to open up each and every one and validate it and say yes, indeed I did write this and I did mean to send it. So, as a first step if we get 20 reviews, we do take a look at where the reviews are coming from so we do have some threshold there that will kick-off something that says, ‘you know what this is a little suspicious or we just don’t want this at all.’

JS: I can understand why you might not want to disclose any of this information, but can you talk about anything that you have in place to guard against astroturfing or false-flaming or anything like that?

Nick: What I can talk about is pretty standard from what I’ve heard in the industry is to pay very, very close attention to the IP address of any dealership. I know some folks who go to the trouble of specifically collecting the IP address of every dealership and for other folks who just pay attention to once a response is written, capture the IP address and then sort-of flag that for any reviews that come later on. So, we do similar stuff there because we do want to make sure we are paying very, very close attention to. Once we feel like something is coming from a dealership, we don’t other different types of content coming from someone who may have a biased viewpoint there.

JS: Have you had any feedback…one of the things that … and almost everyone deals with this because anyone who has reviews, like you said, some kind of IP check…something along those lines, but one of those throwing the baby out with the bathwater type of issues, at least from my perspective, is that it’s really convenient if a dealer can just leave up a computer and have the new car buyer talk about their experience, right there in the moment.

Nick: It’s one of the hardest things in the world and it comes up so often and it’s such a great idea, you know ‘I’m in the store, I’m buying a car, I’m sitting there waiting for the financing to go through (or whatever it is)’, and they say, ‘why don’t you go ahead and leave a review for me while you’re here.’ We would love to be able to do it, it’s just that the number one concern, from both site users and dealers was that we’re filtering out those false-positives. We’ve suggested some things and I had one dealer come up to me at NADA this year and he actually suggested that he was going to create an entirely separate network at his store to have a separate IP address just so people could still leave reviews, but they would always be replying on different machines. I thought that was interesting.

JS: But, would he be recycling the IP address?

Nick: No, so he was actually talking about setting up an entirely different network with a different IP address that he would be paying extra money to support; just to be able to capture those on site.

JS: But, you would still see that there would be multiple, multiple, multiple entries from the same IP address.

Nick: You would, and that’s the type of thing that would have to be worked out with the concept of ‘how can I really verify that they have this kiosk in the store.’ And that’s something that I called out to him and I think that’s it’s something that we could probably do if we have someone going to that extent to keep things pure, but initially it would flag something on our side and probably other places to say that the volume coming in from one location is abnormally high. That’s where you would look at voice, you look at dates they came in, you look at scores…things like that.

JS: Makes sense. This is one of the most fascinating areas so I really appreciate you giving some thoughts on that. We have kind of talked about the dealers’ fears….How do you compare yourselves to a Yelp or Google Places or something like that?

Nick: And I kind of make a distinction between those two because Google is such a aggregator of all of the content that’s out there; usually the question that I’ll get is comparing us to Dealer Rater is the big one that comes up. Usually what I tell folks is that our goal was not to set ourselves up as a competitor to any of those sites. Typically when I talk to a dealer I tell them ‘the more places you have positive reviews out there, the better off you’re going to be.’ Because then, wherever people go, because we know people love Yelp, so all the more reason to have positive reviews there. The more places you have reviews, the more likely you are to catch all those various users across sites and see ‘yes, I’m going to have a positive experience at this store.’

I think this is one of the things that I strongly believe you want the content across as many places as possible and that’s when you start playing into Google, as they aggregate from every where, so once they see that there are enough reviews out there, all of a sudden on your Places page, you have a great amount of content, coming all across the Internet. All the more reason for who sees you on Google, says ‘you know what, I am ready to work with this store.’

Going further, I actually do suggest to folks who say ‘why should I be driving volume to Cars.com, rather than Yelp or Google or to Dealer Rater or wherever.’ I tell them, ‘you know, if you’re driving volume to three places just make us the fourth one.’ Again, it’s a win because they have more content out there. But I am not in any way trying to tell them that they should drive traffic to Cars.com because we have found that when people find the sites they like that’s the site they want to leave review content on. And that’s not a bad thing, whatsoever.

Really though, what we look at is, the story I always tell is one of our affiliate sales managers here told me back in December that she was shopping for a car, and she obviously went to Cars.com, she found the exact type of car she wanted. She then narrowed it down, she found the specific vehicle she wanted and she found the dealership where she thought she wanted to shop at, and then she left our site to go do additional research about that dealership. So, I just look at it as the more ways you can integrate that fantastic review content, where people are already digesting other information, the better off you’re going to be. And that’s really the whole reason we started getting into this. I say that the more places there are reviews out there, the better it is for everyone …. It’s just a huge win.

JS: Along those lines, do you have any agreements or discussions with Google Places, with Yahoo! Local, with bing Local, any of those places to use your material?

Nick: We have. I think what you’ll find with most of those places is that they all have their secret sauce and their own way of doing things, but typically the understanding is that you have to build up a certain amount of volume to be viewed as a credible source on this type of content, so we know that once we hit that it will be a lot easier to be aggregated, but our goal is certainly that once we have the volume we will make whatever site tweaks that we need to in order to be included in the aggregation.

JS: So, you definitely want to be included in the aggregation.

Nick: Absolutely. If it gets the content out there, it adds to the SEO value, so we definitely want that out there.

JS: Is there anything else you’d like to add as we wrap up the end of this?

Nick: The more places that content is our there, the better. We are certainly trying to encourage our dealers to view this as it’s an opportunity to really take control of what’s being said about you out there, so we’ve gone to the lengths of trying to provide them with various materials they can use in-store to drive volume. And again, I typically say, ‘if you’re already doing something, if you have banners for a different location, that’s fine. Just add us to the mix, one way or another. But you are driving the volume.’

I really look at it from a dealer perspective and one of the stories I heard from one of the dealers is that they’re viewing reputation management and reviews as a lead generator. So, what they do is look at it and track the number of phone calls they get, specifically from reviews, and they pay attention to the facts of how much more money can they make based on the fact that they have this great reputation that’s out there in the field. So, I’m just trying to convince people and say that this is a really good thing, assuming you really take advantage of it and you really start playing up your positive reputation, the better off it’s going to be for you.

JS: It’s interesting and we deal a lot of times with the opposite of it, where it’s not the wanting to get more leads (of course, they always want to), but when they look at online reviews and reputation management, at least in the beginning, it’s a question of ‘how can they stop any loss or perceived loss’ that is out there because they don’t have enough reviews or if there are some negative reviews out there. So, it’s really interesting to hear the flip-side of that, as well.

Nick: What we really have tried to talk to folks about, and we really have heard this over and over again, as we did our own market research…consumers kept telling us ‘you know, one negative review really isn’t the worst thing in the world and in a lot of cases it’s actually a positive. As when consumers see a lot of reviews that are all five stars as compared to similar scores that are 4.7, 4.8; that 4.7 has a lot more credibility because site users and digesters of information get the fact that every experience is not perfect and sooner or later, someone is going to have a bad day and it’s going to come off ‘not-perfect’.

So, when you do have some of those real-life experiences it’s actually a good thing. I also do try to convince people, when I do talk to them, that when you do get that person who did have a poor experience, it’s a great, great opportunity to leave the response indicating that they want to take personal responsibility for what happened, that it’s an aberration, that’s it’s not typically how you do business and you want to make sure that it goes right. Because all of a sudden, you’ve driven home to the people who come later on, that that’s not how you do business and that you really do care about each individual consumer.

So, yeah, we get it a lot, the first question of ‘what happens when I get a negative review,’ but we really do try to get people to understand that one negative review isn’t the worst thing in the world, and second there are all kind of ways for you to drive volume of positive reviews and the sooner that a dealer starts taking advantage of that and the sooner they start making it part of their process, the better off they’re going to be.

JS: My old boss used to say ‘You have two chances to meet someone….The first time you meet them and the first time you screw up.’ So along those lines, I’m a dealer and someone has just left a negative review. What mechanisms are in place to respond? Do I get to respond privately or only publicly, or am I able to respond to them at all? What are my recourses there?

Nick: This was one of the things that we debated most hotly before the launch; and so what we settled on was that anytime a review is posted the dealership always gets an opportunity to respond to it whether it’s positive or critical. And after they respond we close out the conversation. That was based on a large part on some of the feedback we heard from dealers that don’t do a lot in this space today. They were a little nervous about how much more process we’re going to build into this. So we didn’t want to get into the process of building a whole back and forth public exchange. I also think, anecdotely, I saw a decent amount of situations where that public back and forth just didn’t turn out terribly well. I think it’s just far easier, when you’re having that continued conversation, that you’re just going to regret one way or another.

The one thing that we’re keeping a very close eye on is the concept of allowing a private response before something gets posted. And originally, the way we landed is that we shied away from that because we really wanted the focus to be about your online reputation, less about a way to resolve customer service disputes. I think there’s a great amount of value in that and to be fair it’s kind of the norm in the industry right now. What we were really looking at is that we really have a substantial number of dealerships that don’t do this today and were very, very loud about the fact that they don’t want this proceeds to be complicated so we wanted it to be as simple as possible. That being said, we’re keeping a very, very close eye on the type of feedback that we get because we really need to make sure that if this is something we need to do, that we’re paying attention to it.

JS: Do you have any sort of automated notification system for the dealers if someone leaves a review or is it on them to check it themselves and monitor it daily?

Nick: We have a backend tool for dealers that we call My Dealer Center. And anytime a review is posted on Cars.com, meaning anytime it’s been through validation, moderation and it’s been approved, once it’s posted, the dealer automatically gets an email that says ‘You got a review posted on Cars.com. Please login by clicking this link and write a response to it’. We do make sure that we notify them, whether it’s a positive review or a critical one, we do notify them that it’s there and we do try to encourage them to reply to every single review not just to the ones that may be a review on a experience that was less than ideal.

JS: To me, I see a lot of fear from business owners about that….that it’s just going to be out there and they’re not going to know about it.

Nick: We definitely wanted to avoid that. I think it’s just one of those things that we saw as we got into this that there are places that have been aggregating for a long time and dealers just didn’t know what was there. So, we wanted to make sure that we are doing everything we can to warn them right off the bat.

I’d just like to publicly thank Nick and Cars.com for all their time and transparency regarding their dealer rating and review process.  If you’re shopping for a car, check them out.  Or if you’re a dealer, make sure you sign up for the My Dealer Center and start accepting reviews now!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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And it’s not just on branded searches – it can be for any specific company rating on an outside review site that shows up in their listings, such as for this non-branded search on “tuxedos lexington”:

I can’t say definitively that these haven’t been here before as I couldn’t find any announcement about this, but I checked around the office and we don’t remember seeing them.  The ones they’re pulling from include Yelp, Citysearch, and Yahoo! Local.  We’re not seeing it for other ones like Insider Pages, at least so far. If you want to sniff around and find others they are or are not using these logos for, add it to the comments and I’ll update this post.

What’s really interesting about this is that bing had been seemingly backing away from giving ratings prominence.  For one, users haven’t been able to write reviews directly on bing local listings for about two months now.  For another, they’ve removed star ratings from many local results that they list on the Web results tab (although they’re still in full effect on the local tab).  On that note, I did find some more examples of them including stars on the Web results tab, though they’re still very much far and in between:

The Bottom Line for Local Businesses

So what’s this mean?  While I’m not sure if this is a test or a “permanent” change, it does indicate bing’s getting more serious once again about providing user ratings to its searchers.  And with the logos and giant numbers, it makes listings stand out even more to searchers.  It will also surely make their partners like Yelp happy as it should lead to higher click throughs straight to their listing pages.

Note Bene: My Brave New Local / Social World: Recent Changes to Local & Review Sites and their Effect on Online Reputation Management presentation will be running once again with Online Marketing Connect next week as part of their Search Week.  Registration is free – just click that link.  The reason I bring it up here is that it’s a pre-recorded presentation, so there’s no mention of anything in this post.  Don’t think I’m the Absent Minded SEO or anything – just can’t go back in time.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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This Webinar isn’t for everyone, but will be huge for some.  Here’s a little more information so you can decide whether it’s worth saddling up with a sandwich during lunch*.

* Or the appropriate meal / snack during your morning on the West Coast or evening in Germany or wherever you are. Me? I’m a sandwich freak, so if I were hungry, I’d be gnawing on a sandwich no matter what time of day.

Who Should Attend?

This is aimed for any marketing professional or business owner with basic level (or even no) search engine optimization skills.  If you don’t understand why your site isn’t ranking higher in Google and bing for important search terms, you need to attend.

Who Should Not Attend?

Pros: you can skip this one.  SEMPO did a similar session on SEO audits for experienced SEOs recently, so we’re not duplicating that material.

Non-pros whose sites have no search visibility and don’t care about increasing traffic: if you exist, you can skip, too.

Busy non-pros who do care about better understanding SEO: skip, but send someone else in your place to take notes.

Why You Should Attend

1. Demystify search.  The search engines guard their ranking formulae (or algorithms) more closely than Colonel Sanders’ corporate descendants guard his 11 secret herbs and spices.  But there are certain things that have been proven to help or hurt sites’ rankings.
2. Chock full o’ information. This Webinar is so packed with useful information, it may even come off a little dry…unlike the Colonel’s delicious, delicious chicken. Fortunately, Paul has a background in teaching and speaking and can keep it interesting.  Plus he has a delightful English accent so you can imagine Paul McCartney or John Cleese is delivering an SEO tutorial.
3. Ask questions.  The last 15  minutes will be devoted entirely to your questions.  If you’re left wondering something about how SEO works or about your own site, it’s your own fault. (Or that we had a packed Webinar and couldn’t get to all questions in the time allotted.)
4. It’s Free. The only payment is 45 minutes of your time.

How to Register

The registration process couldn’t be any simpler.  You only have to fill out 6 fields on the registration form, which should take you all of half a minute.

Register today!

Hope you can make it.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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Nothing too interesting when you do a search on St. Patty’s Day: all t-shirts, which you might expect. They did throw in some product results as well, which were more interesting and included personalized gifts, posters, and boutonnieres (misspelled on the ad and the product page – way to go, Target).

Overall, nothing too exciting, although if the click costs are reasonable, I’d imagine all of these companies are making money today for being on top of the holiday.

So I was about to do some more searches to see if I could find anything more interesting, when the Realtime results caught my eye.

For those of you not familiar, Google will include realtime results within their standard results for certain search queries that are trending and likely to have lots of people talking about them right now (like “St. Patty’s Day” on the actual day).

The vast majority of these results come from twitter, but they can come from other sources as well, like Google Buzz.  I mean, I think they still do – need confirmation that Google Buzz still exists.  [Quick search]  Yup, it still exists. If you want to see Realtime results for any search phrase regardless of whether or not Google is displaying them within their standard results, no problem.  Under the date range section on the left hand side of the results, choose “Latest.”

Bing also offers up real time results, although theirs are exclusively from twitter.  These results work okay in IE, but not so much in firefox, or at least my version / OS system combo.  They tend to run over the paid ads, which I’m sure Microsoft adCenter advertisers are thrilled with:

Anyway, back to Google.  When I looked down at the Realtime results, I saw this (click to zoom):

Well, at first I had normal SafeSearch set at Moderate, the default setting.  But then, I went in and changed it to Strict and still got this same result.  If you don’t want to click to enlarge, I don’t blame you.  It shows a tweet from a woman whose twitter profile pic is basically her face and her hands holding / covering her bare breasts.  Her twitter handle?  PunkRockT**s.  Now, there was nothing wrong with her tweet itself: “Happy St Patty’s Day! Crack open a Guinness!”  I’m not prudish about these types of things, but with three kids under six who use the computer and will be Googling soon, this does bother me.

SafeSearch Strict Difficulties

Let’s be fair about this to Google:

1. The tweet itself should not have set off any flags.
2. With twitter handles, there’s no spacing.  So if you would automatically filter out this site owner’s / affiliate’s profile based on the handle, you’d also be filtering out other combinations.  For example, what if someone really hated TSA’s current security features and set up a profile for AntiTSA?
3. Pictures can be tricky.  No nipples are showing and you’ll see cleavage walking down virtually any street in the U.S. on a hot summer day and certainly at any beach.  It’s easier for a human to tell that this picture is skanky and likely to lead to an unsafe result for children.

Now, let’s be a little more critical:

1. If you’re choosing to make your SafeSearch results strict, you probably don’t care about a little collateral damage and want Google to err on the side of caution.  That would be enough to kick out this twitterer’s tweets based on the handle.
2. They do have the ability to scan images to determine – to a large degree – what should appear in image results, so they could use this same technology for social media profile pics.  However, you wonder if Google has the same definition of “Strict” as the average person when you have that setting applied and do an image search for breasts (CAUTION – EXTREMELY NSFW, especially if you don’t have your settings already set to “Strict”).
3. Google absolutely knows how to crawl sites.  If they crawled her landing page (which is what you’d see if you clicked on her name – I keep defaulting to “her” because of the name even though I’d bet dollars to donuts that it’s some guy running this stream), they would see some absolutely unsuitable words in her timeline, and right at the top.  They’d also see a ton of links to a tumblr for a site called “naughtyamateurs.”  I thought at first this might be for Phil Fulmer’s former players.  Turns out, no.  The other thing you’d expect from that name.

I completely understand posting real time results creates difficulties in this arena for any search engine.  But, if you’re going to offer supposedly safe search results, you need to figure it out BEFORE you start including the results.  If you can’t, why not just turn off Realtime results for anyone with the Strict setting?

Happy St. Patty’s

And now, back to the real reason for this post.  A very merry St. Patrick’s Day to ya.  Enjoy all the green-laden festivities and best of luck to you in your NCAA pool.  Let’s Goooooooo, Mountaineers!  And ‘Dores!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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Coaching on how to respond in a positive, non-defensive manner is one of the first things we go over with clients after discovery and planning.  It’s something I also talk about when discussing reputation management in presentations like the one I’ll be giving to the West Virginia University College of Business & Economics next week.

Since I don’t like killing attendees by PowerPoint, here’s the picture I used for the slide titled “How Should We Respond:”

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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Audrey – at least it’s her email address – on the Google Places Team has started sending out surveys to businesses who have Places Pages verified.  Maybe we should add direct contact with the big G as another benefit of verifying Google Places Pages.  It’s pretty insightful into what Google’s thinking in their long term plans for local, so here it is in its entirety along with some select comments.  Pretty fascinating.

Note: I’m adding numbers to questions and the formatting is goofing a little, but you’ll get the gist.  I’m feeling too lazy to do screenshots.

Google Places Pages Survey

Thank you for offering your feedback to help improve our products!
Understanding your experiences and opinions is critical to making our products better for YOU.

You must be at least 18 years old to participate in Google user research.
We will only use your personal information for the purpose of Google user research and will not share it with anyone else. For details on how Google treats your personal information, please read our Privacy Policy.

1. Which best describes your role(s) in the business(es) you have listed on Google Places (formerly known as the the Local Business Center)?

Select all that apply.

	Business owner of the listed business(es)
	Not the business owner, but work at the listed business(es) (e.g., marketing manager, IT department)
	Third party web or online marketing agency
	Third party SEO (search enginer optimizer)
	Friend or family member
	Other. Please specify:

JS – Find it ironic that Google misspells search engine optimizer here.

2. Which best describes the business you have a listing for on Google Places?

Select all that apply.

	Customers come to my store or business (e.g. clothing store)
	I go to my customer’s location (e.g. plumber)
	I partner with another business to provide services at their location. (e.g. personal trainer at a gym)
	Customers purchase my products online
	Other, please specify:

3. Approximately how many locations does your business have?
4. How many employees does your business have?
5. Do you currently use Google AdWords?

	I use Google AdWords.
	I have previously used Google AdWords, but do not currently.
	I do not use Google AdWords.

6. What do you know about Google Tags?

	I have never heard of Google Tags.
	I have heard of Google Tags, but do not know what it is.
	I know what Google Tags is, but have never used it.
	I know what Google Tags is, and currently use it.
	I know what Google Tags is, and have previously used it, but do not currently use it.

7. Have you ever seen information about your business, online, that was incorrect?

	No, never.
	Yes, a few times.
	Yes, many times.

8. Of the following features, please choose up to three that you would find useful in managing your business information online.

Please select up to three items.

	An advertisement that appears along with your business’ basic information, where it appears on other sites.
	Guaranteed updates on the three sites important to your business, that you mentioned earlier.
	Guaranteed updates on 10 new sites that you might not be aware of.
	Have my basic business information distributed and updated across a range of sites.
	Automatic notifications when people post anything about my business online, such as photos, reviews, or discussions.
	Notification of when different sites are successfully updated with my information.
	The ability to respond to various online sites’ reviews, from one place.
	An aggregated view of customer discussions of my business on social media sites.
	Other
	None of these would be useful to my business.

JS – Alright, this is where it gets interesting. Look at the list here. Not the first one so much as that’s a way to set up future revenue streams (you’ll see more on this in a bit). But then look at the next several. This indicates a partnership with other sites. Are these sites that Google would own by creating or, more likely, purchasing? Or they would form partnerships with? Then look at the sixth one. Google Alerts on steroids: automatic notifications. Would this just be on the partnered sites, or is it wherever it happens? This could be awesome or awful news for online / social media monitoring tools. If I’m Andy Beal, for example, I’m beefing up trackur with as many new features as I can think of NOW. Ultimately, the purpose of all these is to make Google the central hub for businesses in this ever-increasing online turf war among the major players.

9. Please indicate which of the following online review and rating, social networking, or phonebook listing sites you use to promote your business:

Review and Rating Sites
	Insider Pages
	Yelp!
	Citysearch
	TripAdvisor
	Other review sites, please specify:
Social networking sites
	MySpace
	Facebook
	LinkedIn
	Twitter
	Foursquare
	Other social networking sites, please specify:
Phone book listing & directory sites
	Bing local listing
	Yellowpages
	Yahoo! Local listing
	Other online directories, please specify:

JS – Well played, G. Getting the goods on competitors, partners, and potential partners all in one space. I’m not sure if I’d be more worried to be listed under the “Review and Rating Site” section or to not be listed there.

10. Please indicate which of the following online review and rating, social networking, or phonebook listing sites you pay to advertise your business on:

Review and Rating Sites
	Insider Pages
	Yelp!
	Citysearch
	TripAdvisor
	Other review sites, please specify:
Social networking sites
	MySpace
	Facebook
	LinkedIn
	Twitter
	Foursquare
	Other social networking sites, please specify:
Phone book listing & directory sites
	Bing local listing
	Yellowpages
	Yahoo! Local listing
	Other online directories, please specify:

11. How frequently have you tried to update or correct your business’ information on any of those sites in the past year?

	I have never updated my business’ information on other sites.
	I have updated my business’ information before, but not in the past year.
	I updated information once in the past year.
	I updated information a few times over the year.
	I updated information a few times each month.
	I updated information a few times each week.
	I updated information a few times a day.

Please tell us more about how you update your business’ information online.

12. Why did you update your business’ information?

Please check all that apply.

	My business moved.
	I changed my phone number.
	I changed or updated my website.
	I changed my email address.
	I posted news about my business.
	I posted about a sale or discount.
	I wanted to start a discussion with my customers.
	I posted about an event.
	Other, please specify:
	I did not update my business’ information.

13. Where did you update that information?

Please check all that apply.

	On my website.
	On a few, select websites (social media, directory, or review sites)
	On many websites (social media, directory, or review sites)
	Other, please specify:

Please review the features of package A below, and let us know your level of interest.

Package A: $25 per year.

* Have my basic business information distributed and updated across a range of sites.
* An advertisement that appears along with your business’ basic information, on other sites.

JS – And here’s the monetization. Doesn’t seem like much, but it’s only $25. Easy sell. Maybe one they could even do through their regular methods and not need to provide much customer service for. Would be a ton of headaches, though. If they don’t do any customer service, Google’s own reputation will start taking even more of a hit than it has recently as they get tons of cranky people who don’t net them much money moaning and needing a lot of hand holding.

14. Would this package be useful to your business?

	Yes, it would be useful.
	Maybe, but it is missing a key feature:
	No, it does not seem useful to my business.
	I do not know if this would be useful for my business.

15. How would you feel about actually buying the package for $25 a year?

	I would definitely buy this package.
	I would most likely buy this package.
	I might consider buying this package.
	I most likely would not buy this package.
	I would definitely not buy this package.

16. If you had the option to add one feature to that package for an additional $25/year, which of the following would you pick?

	Guaranteed updates on 10 new sites that you might not be aware of.
	An aggregated view of customer discussions of my business on social media sites.
	Notification of when different sites are successfully updated with my information.
	The ability to respond to various online sites’ reviews, from one place.
	Guaranteed updates on the three sites important to your business, that you mentioned earlier.
	Automatic notifications when people post anything about my business online, such as photos, reviews, or discussions.
	I would not want any of these features.

JS – Here’s the good stuff. “anything about my business online”? For an additional $25 per year. Who doesn’t sign up for that? There’s still a market for making sense of the data, which is good news for our friends at NetBase – but that’s going to put a mighty scare through a lot of different companies out there. I wouldn’t think it would cause any stirs here, but perhaps in Europe where Google’s facing more serious antitrust challenges? Probably not because it wouldn’t be major companies, but I wouldn’t think it would make their attorneys’ lives easier.

Please review the features of package B below, and let us know your level of interest.

Package B: $50 per year.

* Have my basic business information distributed and updated across a range of sites.
* An advertisement that appears along with your business’ basic information, where it appears on other sites.
* Get notifications when people post anything about my business online, such as photos, reviews, or discussions.

JS – This is really the same thing as above, bundling Package A with the most useful add-on for the same price.

17. Would this package be useful to your business?

	Yes, it would be useful.
	Maybe, but it is missing a key feature:
	No, it does not seem useful to my business.
	I do not know if this would be useful for my business.

18. How would you feel about actually buying the package for $50 a year?

	I would definitely buy this package.
	I would most likely buy this package.
	I might consider buying this package.
	I most likely would not buy this package.
	I would definitely not buy this package.

19. If you had the option to add one feature to that package for an additional $25/year, which of the following would you pick?

	The ability to respond to various online sites’ reviews, from one place.
	Automatic notifications when people post anything about my business online, such as photos, reviews, or discussions.
	An aggregated view of customer discussions of my business on social media sites.
	Notification of when different sites are successfully updated with my information.
	Guaranteed updates on 10 new sites that you might not be aware of.
	Guaranteed updates on the three sites important to your business, that you mentioned earlier.
	I would not want any of these features.

Thank you very much for helping us improve Google products!

20. May Google contact you regarding your feedback, or for future user research opportunities?

You must be at least 18 years old to participate in Google user research.
We will only use your personal information for purposes of Google user research and will not share it with anyone else.
For details on how Google treats your personal information, please read our Privacy Policy.

	No, thanks
	Yes, you may contact me at this email:

So What Do You Think?

If you’re an SEO – how do you think this will affect you?  If you’re not, are these products you’d be interested in?  Would love to hear your thoughts!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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