Local Roll Call Launches

localrollcall.com was officially launched on April 16th 2009 and we barely made it by the skin of our teeth. Scott Dance from the Baltimore Business Journal wrote an excellent article about our little start-up. Although we don't consider it a true start-up since we've proven this to be successful before.

Thanks to this article LRC saw traffic jump to over 900 visitors and over 6,000 page views worldwide. The U.S. saw the biggest traffic especially from you know where. This may seem like blip on the radar from any campaigns we had running at Advertising.com but it is a great jump start.

We are working out the bugs and beta-testing the site and we expect to be rolling out some new features in the next few weeks. Video and social media are definitely tops on that list.

If you haven't added your business to our free directory....please do so. Hopefully by the end of the year, we'll get 6,000 page views an hour.

Google Gathering Far and Wide - Why?

We recently started working on a website from a business that has been a Baltimore institution since 1971.
This jeweler at one time had multiple locations but has since narrowed it's focus down to one location. That's it....just one.

If you take a look at Google local you would think they have stores all across Baltimore and Washington D.C. One would assume that proximity would help establish a better position within Google. In this case it's quite the contrary. The first listing is an outdated listing from Superpages.com that puts the store location directly in Washington D.C., which is a good 40 minutes from the true location(without traffic if you're lucky). The listing in Superpages is no longer there, so it seems Superpages deleted that listing but Google still has it displaying long after it was actually removed.

The second is a correct listing by is being served up by nearbynow.com. The problem with this listing is that it is (as well as all of the others) Conflicting with the true listing that the client has seen and requested modified. We are submitting a duplicate request deletion for this location.

Third listing is actually the store's corporate office which is off site. So even if someone wanted to stop in to buy a quick $20,000 engagement ring, they wouldn't be able to...unless Camilla or Debby jumped in their car and drive them over to the Mall.

The fourth listing is another store that closed some time ago and is still listed.

Finally number five somehow is also listing a location not even remotely close to the actual store. The address is correct but it's still a good 30 minutes away.

It seems Google is attempting to provide and append data and it's pulling in multiple source to get from one true location to having five. We will go in and dispute the duplicates, but it just goes to prove that even the biggest search engine in the world needs a hand or two to clean up the local data.

We'll check back on that listing in a few weeks.