Tag Archives: local search engine optimization

Bing localAccording to an article on TechCrunch.com, Bing and Yelp announced a partnership that will bring Yelp’s local business content to Bing’s local search pages. The pages will now say “Powered by Yelp,” and will integrate Yelp’s reviews, photos and business information with Bing’s local search pages.

The partnership with Yelp is not the only agreement Bing has made lately. It has also partnered with Qwiki, a video startup that translates text content into video and integrated with Facebook. These partnerships aim to increase the quality of Bing’s search results in an attempt to take on the search giant, Google.Yelp

In late 2009, Google was considering buying Yelp for half a billion dollars. However, tensions grew between the two companies after Google crawled Yelp’s content and used it for its Places application without forming a partnership. Google then decided to buy Zagat instead and get rid of all of Yelp’s information. Zagat is now a chief component in Google’s newest local search application, Google+ Local.

Although Bing’s new partnerships look promising for the search engine, getting people to switch from Google to Bing is a tough job. Which search engine do you use? Do Bing’s recent attempts to better its service entice you to switch from Google to Bing?

ApplemapsAccording to an article on ScreenWerk.com, Apple has partnered with the following companies in order to gather data for its new Maps application:

  • TomTom
  • Acxiom
  • CoreLogic
  • DigitalGlobe
  • DMTI
  • Getchee
  • Intermap
  • LeadDog
  • Localeze
  • MapData Sciences Pty Ltd.
  • MDA Information Systems, Inc.
  • Urban Mapping
  • Waze
  • Yelp

ScreenWerk.com got this information from a copyright page. Are there any data providers that you know about that are missing from this list? There will be more information to come about Apple Maps as it becomes available so stay tuned!

Google shoppingSoon, online retailers will have to pay in order to have their products displayed on Google Shopping. Currently, retailers can provide information to Google about their products and have them displayed on the site for free. However, Google has made the decision to begin charging for its product listings.

The listings will also be displayed differently after Google begins charging for the service. Currently, when someone searches for a certain product, such as “vacuum cleaner,” the top five most popular vacuum cleaners from the shopping page are displayed under a few organic listings on the results page. After the change, those links will begin to appear above the main search results with images of what Google thinks are the most relevant products on the Google Shopping site.

While some marketers are happy about the new Google Shopping site, others fear that it could be the beginning of the end of Google’s free business listings. Small retailers also worry that paid Google Shopping listings will make it difficult for them to compete with the large advertising budget of big online retailers.

What do you think about paid product listings in Google Shopping; is good thing or a bad thing?