Cute and fluffy? Yes they are - just pick one up. Mwahahaha

I was looking for more contact info for Luther Lowe and noticed his tweet about a blog post explaining Yelp’s Review Filter. Luther does a good job of explaining the Yelp Review Filter and Yelp has commissioned a video which tries to explain it in a friendly way. The review filter, Yelp’s legal woes and the general state of Yelpdom have been the topics of many conversations lately.

While in Portland last week presenting on Facebook Marketing at SEMpdx SearchFest I had a couple great dinners with some really smart people. One of those dinners included the aforementioned smart person Luther Lowe who is part of Yelp’s business outreach team.

From what I could discern, that the most critical component of the review filter is one which looks at a users yelpish tendancies to see how active a yelper they are. In other words, if you just created your account, or have a very thin profile you might get filtered.

I can see it. I understand it, but I think the position Yelp takes regarding small businesses requesting reviews is unreasonable. And, their system presumes guilt which is downright un-American.

I’m assured by some of Luther’s colleagues with whom I spoke at SMX West that there are semantic elements too. But, it looks like the biggest factor is how “real” you look by virtue of your history on Yelp.

But, as we learned at SMX, Yelp has 180 in Sales & Marketing as compared to 40 Engineers.

New post on the Search Influence Blog in response to a post on the Yelp Blog.

You need to watch out! I was just reading the Google Lat Long Blog and they’re telling people to edit YOUR Google business listing.

This is really, really, bad. Look at this picture. I didn’t want to steal the image from the Google blog post so I made my own which shows a business listing on Google in grave danger.

Your Google business listing is in danger!

We’ve talked in the past about the importance of claiming your Google. It’s critical. Do it now!

It’s so simple to claim these listings and even though Google is advertising like crazy too many businesses are leaving it up to some random visitor to edit their Google business listing?

I'm sure this isn't new, but it's new to me and very funny!

Written on February 21st, 2010 at 12:02 am by Darren Rowse

A Lesson from Curious George for Bloggers

Writing Content 59 comments

The books of choice at bed time in my 3 year olds room are all Curious George books at the moment. He's crazy for George.

Needless to say that the 6 Curious George books that we have are getting read again and again - I pretty much know them off by heart... to the point that I've started taking less notice of the story itself and more notice of HOW its been written.

There's one thing about Curious George Books (or at least the ones we have) that I've noticed that really makes them more engaging than some of the other kids books my boy reads.

Do you know what it is?

It's something that draws my boy further and further into the book.

Any ideas what it could be?

What a great post from ProBlogger - Maybe it's that I'm a sucker for Curious George (and my kids are too).

Want to know the secret?