Google has made some adjustments to it’s “Place Pages.” As Doug Caverly reported, they are now showing more specific details for reviews. They are letting people rate individual aspects of businesses.

Another update that Google made is the addition of verification to the Place Page. Google is letting users know when owners have verified their Place Pages. If it is verified, there is now a link with a checkmark beside it at the top of the page that says “owner-verified listing.”

In August, Google announced the upcoming roll out of the Google Caffeine infrastructure. Google was quick to point out that they would not launch the new infrastructure until after the Christmas holiday shopping season — giving many online retail stores confidence for the upcoming Christmas shopping season.

In the August announcement, Google described Caffeine this way:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences…”

It’s long been possible to prove a business’s popularity by putting stuff in its window; newspaper reviews and/or a lot of customer’s written comments could do the trick. Google’s offering a higher-tech approach, however, with the release of bar code decals and a “Favorite Places on Google” program.

Google started by sending stickers to 100,000 local businesses. Business owners are supposed to put the stickers in their front windows, and then consumers can scan them with their smartphones and see reviews or access coupons.

Google Caffeine is the name given to Google’s “Next Generation” search engine, which it will use to rank and index all the pages on the wonderful world wide web. According to all indications, this is not just another one of Google’s infamous Updates, but a major “Overhaul” of its index and algorithm - the complex formula and calculations Google uses to rank all web pages, including yours.

Do you really want your website on page one of Google for your chosen keyword phrase(s)? What do you want your marketing online campaign to accomplish for you?

I asked a potential new SEO Coaching client last week this first question. From my end of the phone call, it sounded as if he almost fell out of his chair!

I followed up by asking him if he could ever think of ANY reason for his website pages NOT to be found on page 1 in the Google SERPs (search engine results pages).

Where do you want to be? On the first page of Google results of course; it’s where every one with a website wants to be, especially if their website is part of their business. There are a lot of search engine optimization firms out there, with new ones popping up out of the woodwork daily in order to meet the growing demand for SEO services.

By Michael Gray

In the past few months all of the search engines, but especially Google have released or started supporting new ways of fixing site architecture issues. However IMHO these are band-aid solutions for bad site architecture, and not something you should rely on … at all.

Being a full-time SEM (Search Engine Marketer) I have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog (not a pretty picture) to jump every time Google twitches. Lately Google has been doing a lot of twitching.

Specifically, the rather startling news from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa that Google has ditched PageRank from Webmaster Tools.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” states Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” (Source: WebProNews)

Last week Google launched a new Google Maps feature called Place Pages. The purpose of these pages is to include as much information about places (which can be businesses or cities) in one spot. So for example (the example Google used upon announcement), if I search for “Burdick Chocolate Cafe” on Google Maps, and I go to the more info link for its listing (it’s a place in Cambridge, MA), I will get reviews, photos, the map listing, directions, street view, and more.

We’ll be upfront about something here: only companies in San Diego and San Francisco can currently take advantage of this offer. But Google’s rolling out something that should at some point help small businesses in a lot of places reach potential customers online.

Greg Sterling was introduced to an experiment called Google Local Listing Ads yesterday evening. They’re small, text-only ads of the sort Google often displays, only the trick is that they’re shown when people near a company’s physical location search for a type of business.