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Yelp Elite reviews for sale

According to a local NBC affiliate investigation, brokers are paying a subset of Yelp elites to post fake reviews: "one former Yelp Elite told us he was part of an invitation-only online chat that included a few thousand Yelp Elite members who are paid $25 to $50 per fake review." It would appear that despite Yelp’s claim of better reviews, their is mischief afoot and that Yelp review averages reflect low cost filtering rather than a better review corpus

Core Web Vitals: No impact on Local ranking, Google offering SEO training,

An interesting and large scale study from Tomas Acuna of whitespark looked at 4500 local listings across 15 verticals and 15 meteor areas to determine that, in fact, Google’s web core vitals have virtually no impact in the local search algo. Is this due to local sites not being well done or does it just reflect the fact that the local algo is so biased towards location and relevance that it just doesn’t have much impact? 

Where will Google search be in 10 years?

A Reddit thread about increasingly poor search results, led an informal Near Media twitter survey about the future of search. While it is difficult to predict there are current efforts to fundamentally change how and where we search. Regardless of changing search paradigms, Google is likely to remain a domineering tech company

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.
Near Memo Ep 53

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