Have your Google Places search results been erratic lately? When Google released an update to its local search algorithm on (or around) July 24, named “Pigeon” by Search Engine Land analysts, it dramatically affected a number of industry verticals.

Our SEO analysts looked to BrightEdge’ Data Cube before and after the Pigeon update (June through August), analyzing all U.S. desktop queries for which Google displayed Google Places (the “local pack”) results in its SERPs, bucketing those queries into industry groups (verticals) based on their keyword structure.

BrightEdge’s analysis found that Google is displaying local pack results for 11.26 percent fewer queries overall. BrightEdge Cube data also confirms that real estate queries experienced a dramatic decrease of 63.45 percent in their appearance rate in Google Places results.

Last week, I attended the BrightEdge Share14 conference in San Francisco, and came away with heaps of ideas and information to pass on to the NHI team, plus an even greater appreciation for our partnership with the BrightEdge team.

Share14 was easily the most useful industry conference I have ever attended, with presentations focused on technical SEO, social, and content marketing, and plenty of opportunities for networking.

Salesforce launched 15 years ago. With annual revenues expected at more than $5 billion this year, it is hard to remember those days when Salesforce was a scrappy start up, trying to sell enterprise customers on the benefits of the multi-tenant software-as-a-service model. That battle is long over, and since then Salesforce has gone on to introduce a number of other new innovations that were also promptly snapped up with the rest of the industry. Chatter comes to mind; so does its latest product, Community Cloud.

The BrightEdge Vizergy Partnership. At Vizergy, we work closely with BrightEdge, a search marketing authority that offers an enterprise grade SEO platform. Our partnership is an essential component of our advanced SEO strategies. The analysis, tools and research they provide ensure our SEO services are as in depth and effective as possible.

It’s becoming more evident that search and social are not exactly separate silos.

As customers use both search and Facebook in their purchasing decisions, it’s important for companies to make sure those presences are optimized. Jim Yu, the CEO of search and social optimization firm BrightEdge, spoke with Inside Facebook at the company’s Share14 conference in San Francisco about the relationship between the two platforms.

BrightEdge announced it will now provide a new tool dubbed Community Edition to marketers for free. The tool includes access to the company's Data Cube To-Go, which indexes and catalogs billions of pieces of content across the entire Web.

BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu told FierceCMO that the Data Cube analyzes types of topics and keywords, trends, volume and demand, across all different kinds of content. It can help marketers understand the likely success of a piece of content, as well as enable them to see performance over time to understand what content is successful.

"There's just so much industry momentum behind content marketing, but there's a huge challenge around driving performance," he said. "So, we see this as a great opportunity to really help the industry."

theCUBE traveled to the Sheraton Palace Hotel for the fourth annual #Share14, and event put on by BrightEdge, an emerging SEO & content marketing company, headquarted in San Mateo, CA. theCUBE host, Jeff Frick, was able to catchup with Jim Yu, CEO, BrightEdge, and several other influencers in the BrightEdge community following the keynote on Day 2 of the event. Signal Extracted.

Marketing is undergoing a massive transformation that has been fueled by content, social and mobile technologies. A little less than a year ago, I wrote about the "three pillars" for modern marketing to help marketers navigate these industry shifts. At that time I spoke about the importance of streamlining content strategies across search, social and mobile to truly engage customers at every touch point. However, content marketing has progressed significantly over the last several months, bringing new challenges and opportunities for brands. Though brands understand how important content can be, 70 percent of marketers say they lack a cohesive, strategic approach to content, according to Altimeter. That's why today, I'd like to focus on performance and how keen attention to measurement and optimization is what marketers need to get them to the next phase of content marketing success.

If you haven't heard of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, you might need to spend some time rethinking your... well, thinking. As the co-author of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and its sequel SuperFreakonomics, co-authors Dubner and Levitt have learned their fair share of mind-changing lessons, turning the study of economics into an understanding of incentives.

Going mobile is one of the best ways a company can gain revenue and customers today. However, if a mobile implementation is botched, companies can lose on average 68 percent of their smartphone traffic.

In a new study by BrightEdge, some 27 percent of mobile sites have various errors with their mobile development and implementation. BridgeEdge studied dynamic serving, responsive design, and separate mobile URLs in order to see which dynamic had the most errors. Not only does Google support all three types, but mobile responsive web design has been deemed the choice solution. With that being the case, BrightEdge tested sites with implemented responsive design versus other mobile solutions to see if it resulted in differences between smartphone rankings.