I will admit it, I have a very ‘frugal’ attitude towards information and the internet. So when Google bought Zagat it was the first I’d heard of the long running rating service.
For those who are web-frugal like me, it may come as a surprise that this paid food review service has managed to go from a printed format to on-line. Most attempts along those lines die quickly when it becomes obvious there’s a niche for the information. However Zagat’s originators were very clever in how they have gone digital and it’s worked very well indeed:
A paid member of Zagat gets a selection of discounts and promotions which quickly pay for the perks that come with paying $25 a year. Free members have to include payment details which helps to force genuine/honest sign-ups for the most part. This keeps the information useful, while still providing enough access to retain the casual user who might never pay, but is likely to contribute.
With any luck Google will quickly merge this product into their services, allow you to login with your Google profile, and eventually apply all these great search features to the entire database of eateries.
As much as I like to ‘skim’ the net for free, without coughing up any info or details, I decided to try out Zagat’s 7 day offer.
The 1st Challenge:
A hamburger in downtown Victoria BC should be an easy challenge for a city packed with pubs?
Apparently not, since the only result was an “Eclectic / Int’l, Vegetarian” with an impressive almond burger. I’ve had non-meat hamburgers, but ‘Vegetarian’ is not what I was looking for and certainly the last place I’d suggest given my years living here.
The 2nd Challenge:
Pretending I was the average homesick traveller with no idea of the city’s offerings I decided to search for some ‘American’ cuisine.
Thinking of all the steak houses, and US brands operating in the city core, I was sure I’d get a good list to pick from, yet Zagat disappointed me again. This time they suggested a ‘Barbecue, Creole’ dive outside of the city core which is famous for it’s unpretentious ‘here’s sum meat’ approach to dinning. If I had typed in ‘budget BBQ’ that is the only way I would have anticipated such a result.
The 3rd Challenge:
I’d tried something specific, I’d tried an entire country, lets just see what they can list?
Well at first I felt I’d hit the jackpot, look at all the results! Then I started clicking on the places Zagat was suggesting and they were all over in Vancouver, an entirely different city, not even located on the same landmass as my city and currently selected location?
So that’s when I started to see the problem, tried a blank search for “Victoria, Canada” with a radius of 15 miles, and the result was only 29 restaurants..
At that point I started fiddling with the sliders/filters:
- Food
- Decor
- Service
- Cost
- Distance
- % liked
- Relevance
- Reviews
- etc..
Wow!
This is what I want!
Give us tools for doing specific searches!
I need these tools for more than just food, and now I can see another reason (beyond challenging Yelp!) why Google bought Zagat.
Sure my local city needs more reviews to help things along, but that’s not Google or Zagat’s fault, we just need to start discussing something we do every single day.
I know that personally I will give this service a few reviews, once I find a place to have lunch. 
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:39 am
Beanstalk’s Byron Mulcaster has just completed an excellent article on Google+ and it’s potential impact on SEO. This is of course a property early in it’s evolution and all our readers should be sure to visit our blog often as Byron will be writing followup articles as the evolution progresses.
Right now Google+ is set to be abused by SEO’s and webmasters and others in social media. While Google works hard to counteract this the early adopters (SEO’s and nerds - the people most prone to abuse the system to see what they do) we’re all trying to find the best marketing and SEO angles for ourselves and our clients. And unfortunately for Google – one of the best ways to amass users and businesses is to open the gates and give us the benefits. Well in this article Byron covers some of these benefits and how you can use them to further your site and marketing efforts.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 3:20 pm
If you’ve been able to get on-line with all the outages this morning (EAST-1 was down for a bit) then you may have seen a number of links showing up for ‘free invites’ to Google+.
I know we did an article about the rumor that Google+ was going to accept new sign-ons without invitations on July 31st, but this came from the ‘official Facebook group’ which was a rather poor source. To my knowledge, the rumour never panned out and we still have an invite only system in place where Google can track how each person is related to the next. It’s not hard to get into Google+, it’s only difficult to do it anonymously.
Almost all the links are valid, point to a “ngemlink” path, and seem to work, even though the final section appears to be totally random:
Random invite example #1
Random invite example #2
Random invite example #3
This would mean that advertisers, groups, and other technically ‘unwanted’ new users should be hitting the system for the first time without a legitimate connection to the accounts that are letting them join? If that’s the case, where’s the response? The only thing I found related to spamming on Google threads today was this little thank you picture:
Perhaps I am in a quite circle of the web and I haven’t got the exposure to such things, but my Google+ profile has been entirely spam free. Indeed, the worst offender for spamming are associates in the SEO business that like to push out a few posts per day due to the wide range of stuff they tackle. Most of that content is related to topics that I’m interested in both professionally and personally, so it’s not really spam per se, just an excess of content that dwarfs the smaller feeds.
It’s quiet, almost too quiet..
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:43 am
Although you can only join by invitation at this point, you’ve no doubt heard of Google+, Google’s latest attempt to join (or, in time perhaps, completely overtake?) Facebook and Twitter as a must have social networking tool. In the months before Google+ was launched, Google also began implementing the “+1″ button as a usable option for users to signify that they enjoy a particular site or page in an attempt to gather as much raw data as possible about the popularity and social value of sites and content before Google+ was rolled out for the masses. Preceding the Google+ and +1 button was the introduction of real time search, which was able to incorporate search results from Twitter, blogs and Facebook. Google, it would appear, is realizing the immense value of social media and the impact of social media on web search.
Search will continue to have a social element infused into it as the addition of the +1 button will change search results, as will live feeds from Google+ pages, much like Facebook “likes” and Twitter “tweets” are currently affecting search results by influencing user decisions due to their value as endorsements of certain sites and content.
Google definitely wants websites to implement the +1 button in their pages so that they can track and measure changes in click through rates. The +1 button will also be included on all SERPs as well as all Google+ feeds. What this means is business owners and marketers must ensure that a positive customer experience is, perhaps more than ever before, their primary focus in the hope that as many users as possible will +1 their site, and in doing so, endorse their business (and by association, reputation).
But perhaps the most interesting concept presented by Google+, and one that could potentially have a significant impact on SEO, is the “Google Circles” feature.
*The resemblance to a Venn diagram is noteworthy, if Circles take on the same functionality it would allow users to change affiliations by readjusting overlap as required – think about it Google!*
The “Circles” feature is interesting because it grants users the ability to share whatever they choose with specific groups, or Circles, of people. As Google+ users build their Circles, they will subsequently be able to see the sites that users in their circles have +1′d in Google’s SERPs. This has enormous potential – users will be far more likely to make a choice or purchase based on the recommendation of people they have invited to their Circles – people who they know and whose opinions they trust. Most users are going to be far more likely to trust the recommendation of someone they know rather than the recommendation or review from a stranger. Over time, Circles will become much more defined as more available user data is integrated into them – using that data to effectively market could be potentially powerful SEO strategy.
Basically, Google has taken the ideas behind some of their social media competitors more influential and successful features in an attempt to make search more about real people. Google+ and the +1 button are enabling users to influence online activity, and, as such, they will have an effect on search results. How this will fully impact SEO remains to be seen, but the enormous potential of these features and their long term impact is fairly clear – site ranking methods are changing thanks to the +1 button and this will likely end up creating an altogether new method of SEO in the future.
SEO news blog post by Byron Mulcaster @ 3:39 pm
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