Running Amok at the Google Plex In November I met up with Google Top Contributors from North and South America for Google’s TC Summit. Here’s ⅗ of my face with some really fantastic humans who like to help others with Google’s stuff. 2017 Google Top Contributor Summit – Americas A little background: Google’s Top Contributor program is basically a group of hand-picked tech enthusiasts who hang around in Google’s product forums and help. I’m a part of the Webmaster Central Help Forum. We tackle all the stuff you associate with SEO, and then some. It’s wicked fun. I’ve been in that forum since around 2008 and before that in Google’s Sitemaps forum (when figuring out XML syntax was the fresh hot thing re: ~2005/6ish). It’s no wonder I have such a hoppin’ social life, yeah? So, whatd’ya do? Day 1 > General Fun UX Studies Per product 1:1 time…

(Editor’s note: This post has received some criticism that I “gamed” the outcome by using the unusual case of a two businesses with the same address and phone number. While I agree that the majority of businesses won’t have this issue, there still is a huge swath of them that do. We deal with them every day. That said, if you are one of the lucky businesses that is not affected by this kind of thing, then your results with Moz Local will likely be different.) Last year, Local SEO Guide paid Moz Local about $17,000. Our primary goal was to use it as a one-stop shop to push some of our clients’ info to the main data listings aggregators. While the service worked for our needs, it was not without its share of hiccups. Our contract is up for renewal and before we committed to another year, we wanted…

Woke up this morning to see that Dixon Jones, who runs marketing for Majestic, will be transitioning out of his role and into retirement. Majestic has long proven itself to be a top shelf (maybe even THE top shelf, but more on that later) link index tool and his contributions to the industry have been equally top tier. I’m both sad and elated at the news. Dixon has been a huge help in getting the Local SEO Ranking Factors off the ground, graciously providing us backlink data for the first ever version of the study and has been a valuable partner ever since. But it’s always a good thing when people get to pivot or scale back their careers on their own terms. Cheers Dixon, you will be sorely missed. The post One More Link for Dixon Jones appeared first on Local SEO Guide.