Reputation management, and incentivizing reviews, just got a whole lot more important.

It appears that Google is now showing Zagat-like review snippets in a very prominent slot within Places.

Already dealt a body blow by the 10-pack, Internet Yellow Pages who tried to cope with the loss of traffic by buying more Adwords are now going to find it even more difficult to compete.  If the Yellow Pages companies want to stay in business, they simply have to acknowledge that the real value that sales reps can provide is as web marketing advisors, rather than salespeople for a proprietary product.

A liveblog of the August 2009 Local Search Summit at which Google announced its first whitelist availability for the Local Business Center (the ancestor of Bulk Verification for Google Business Profiles).

I’ve seen paid search for my clients become dramatically more competitive in the last 12-16 months, and the ROI for SMB’s, and thus for their providers, just isn’t going to sustain itself.

It’s doubtful that we’ll see any of these suggestions happen, but they’ve been bouncing around in my head for several months & I finally felt compelled enough to get them down into pixels.

One of the main reasons that I think Google is already, or will soon be, obfuscating citation data in much the same way they obfuscate link data is that their Local algorithm will become increasingly dependent on it.

I’m as addicted to the Google Kool-Aid as much as the next guy, partly because Google drives roughly 85% of all search traffic to my own website, and to my clients’ sites. But, have you used Yahoo Local lately? I mean REALLY used it?

While I am preserving this post as a historical artifact of what drove local search rankings in Google in the late 2000s, the concept it describes — particularly as it relates to volume — no longer holds true.

The real problem with local search is that search engines and local listing sites aren’t returning results that users want to see.