Archive for March, 2011

Lock & Door Contractor Blames SuperMedia Yellow Pages For Their Own Bad Service

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Yellow Pages & LocksThe Morning Call in Pennsylvania reports about how “Always In Service”, a lock and door company, have run afoul of customers and the state’s attorney general office. In fact the attorney general’s office is suing them alleging the company misled customers into believing it was near their homes; charged more than estimated prices; failed to provide itemized bills; did poor work; and didn’t do work that was paid for.

Now Always In Service is suing SuperMedia, claiming the yellow pages company’s sales reps were trained to be deceptive to Always In Service and that they had advised them to buy local phone numbers with and advertise those numbers so customers would think the company was local.

As I’ve touched upon before and as others have covered, the locksmiths industry (among other types of businesses) have had a lot of trouble with the creation of bogus online business listings or listings which are engineered to deceive consumers into thinking a company is local to them. While it sounds like Always In Service isn’t exactly a locksmith service, they would appear to be operating in a closely-related field. (more…)

NY Artist Molly Dilworth Seeks Fame Through Painting In Google Earth/Maps

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

The Atlantic reported this past week on how one artist in New York, Molly Dilworth has been working to get her rooftop mural paintings picked up by the satellite imagery so that they may appear in Google Earth and Google Maps.

Rooftop Mural at 547 W 27th St, New York, NY, by Molly Dilworth

Rooftop Mural at 547 W 27th St, New York, NY, by Molly Dilworth. © Gil Blank 2009

The article reports how long the lagtime is between when the satellite and aerial photos in Google Earth are updated, and how she’s found it challenging to make the paintings visible enough to be seen in them. It appears to me that she’s progressively made the images with higher resolutions as she experiments with the medium.

As you may recall, I’ve reported on Earth Art that may appear in Google Maps as well as various attempts people have made to get messages and ads into the satellite pictures. Rooftop ads seem to come and go periodically (more…)

Google Site Blocking Feature – An Assault On SEO?

Friday, March 11th, 2011

During this week’s SMX West conference, Google announced a new feature whereby searchers may block domains from appearing in their search results:

Google Block Domains from Results - Rush Limbaugh

The part of Google’s announcement which grabbed more attention from search engine optimization experts is this statement from the end of the post:

“…while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future…”

I think it entirely likely that Google will (more…)