Author : Satellite TV (IP: 117.254.157.153 , 117.254.157.153)
E-mail : kiran@gmail.com
URL    : http://www.dishnetwork.com/
Whois  : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=117.254.157.153
Comment:
This is really a very god software, google map this is really great it takes us were ever we want to go

You can see all comments on this post here:
http://www.dewpointproductions.com/seo_blog/local-search/google-map-ny-locksmiths/#comments

We’ve broken the link here, to not give them credit for an already unethical practice.  Now DISH could come back and say well we never authorized this, but lets face it, why else would a company in India be putting this out there.  Certainly, someone at DISH authorized it and is even paying to have their link spammed to the World Wide Web.

Way to go DISH, you just ensured that we’ll never be fans.

I returned to the office today after being away on vacation to find a letter and decal from Google recognizing our company as a “Favorite Place on Google.”  The letter reads in part“Because you’re so popular, we’re enclosing a window decal that shows customers you’re a ‘Favorite Place on Google.’ The sticker includes a special bar code that potential customers may scan with cameras on their phones.  Then they can see your business listing on Google, read and write reviews, and add you as a favorite right there.”

There’s only one problem,  after a Google employee Brian B apparently lied lacked the information necessary to give an accurate answer to queries about the problem back in November about how there was a bug keeping web site design and marketing firms from showing up; Google employee Joel H of the “Geo Consumer Operations Team” has now admitted in the same thread as Brian B that the manipulation of Web firm listings in search is intentional.

I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today.

Matt McGee, over at Search Engine Land, points out that nearly identical searches with the exception of the word “in” return entirely different results.

Here’s a screen shot of the results for Website Design in Mountain View Ca

Do the same search but drop the word “in” and sure enough the local 7 pack disappears Google and all.

Mike Blumenthal, who writes one of the definitive blogs on Google Maps, has posted some good questions that I would love to hear answers for from Google even if they did treat themselves the same as their treating everyone else with a listing for Website Design

If you have a business name that could cause the search engine for Google local similar confusion, you should check to see if you’re showing up for terms you don’t want to appear for.  One easy way to do this is to go into your Google Local Business Center and see what terms your getting impressions for.  You can also, of course, look at your analytics.

You can see from the Adwords on the right that they do in fact know my location is in Lakewood, Colorado.  So what gives?  Other than a bug / coding error on Google’s part there’s really no explanation.

What’s the most interesting Google Local Blooper you’ve seen?

To deal with the trackback spam go to Settings > Discussion and make sure that “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” is unchecked. If someone wants to link to a page or post on the site they can grab the URL and paste it in. Doing this prevents spambots from blitzing your site with trackbacks.

To deal with the comment spam make sure that you have activated Akismet, it’s one of the two plugins that comes with WP by default and it is really good at catching over 90% of the spam. For example, on my blog out of the last 4861 comments I’ve had 4,713 spams caught by Akismet, it let through 148 legitimate comments, and missed only one with an overall accuracy rate of 99.589%. That’s good stuff.

The other plugin I recommend for stopping spam comments is SI Captcha Ani-Spam by Mike Challis. This puts a captcha on the login and/or comments.

If you clicked on the image and were able to read it, what should have struck you right away was the personalization.  They were thanking me for visiting the area.  Big deal?  Here’s the big deal there were only two ways for them to know that I visited the area that day.  I bought my pass and they scanned my pass, that’s it.  They knew I skied because they scanned my pass.  I am sure everyone who skied that day who had also opted in to receiving  emails from Meadows got a similar email.  This in itself is pretty cool stuff there checking their database of who skied against those who have opted into email and auto generating the campaign based on that.  This is a level of email sophistication you don’t often see.

Subject line:

“Tell us about your day at Meadows.”  What do you think their open rate was with a subject line like that and timing it so that recipients got it just two days after their visit?  I am betting it was huge.  They were doing what it is often challenging to accomplish with mass email campaigns, they were speaking directly to me.  Suddenly I wasn’t just part of some mass campaign they knew I was there and they wanted my feedback.

Greeting line:

Again they nailed it personalizing the email with the name of the recipient.

Body:

This is where they made their first Oops in my opinion, but they also got somethings right.

They asked for my feedback directing me to a short survey and using some fun communication by comparing the time it takes to fill out the survey with a ride up one of their express chair lifts.  They go on to invite me to upload pictures and videos of my day to their site. Oops. This is where they also blew it.  The oops comes in the form of the link at the end of the sentence telling me “If you took some pictures or video of your day at Meadows, you can share them with others viewing our website.   Why are they directing me to their “Conditions” page.  They lead me to believe I would be landing on a page where I could upload pictures and video and then took me to a completely unrelated page.    The next oops isn’t quite as big, but it could still use some improvement and it comes in the form of the second link where they ask me to share my story behind the images on their Guest Stories Blog.  Unfortunately, the landing the page they chose http://www.skihood.com/Community-and-News/Meadows-Blog/Posts/2009/08/Guest-Stories  is a post from August 29th inviting people to share their stories. Unfortunately, at first glance it looks like no stories have been uploaded even though there’s a link to do so and you’re left wondering where your story will appear.  It’s true there is a link under categories in the right hand menu, but as their web designer should know right hand menus often get overlooked and you certainly don’t want people to have to search for information.  What they should have done is made this a static page not a blog post and at the bottom of the page their should be an rss for image thumbnails showing latest 5 images which would be clickable links to the post with the image or at least to the blog category archive page.

Sig line:

Finally they deserve kudos for their sig line which offered three ways to connect.  One thing though that you can’t see from the screen shot that I posted was that for email clients that by default don’t show images, at least without being enabled, and that’s most email clients the email seemed to end with “When away from the mountain you cn stay connected by following us on:”  What they should have done is made it so that if image viewing isn’t turned on in an email client there would be links there saying Twitter |  Facebook.

In spite of the three Oops, I am still really impressed with this campaign.  I think a lot more businesses that track when customers or clients have visited their establishment could use something like this.   Kudos Meadows.