Changing the city of operation and trying to know the best way of informing Google
-
We are having a business operating out of three cities A, B and C with A being the primary address and the business provides its services in B and C as well. Business has decided to shut shop in C and instead add D as another city. Currently the URLs are like www.domainname.com/A/productswww.domainname.com/B/productswww.domainname.com/C/productsPlease help us in understanding the best way to inform google that City C is non operational now.Do we need to do the redirects, and if yes, should we do the redirects to Home Page?Or can we just remove the C city URLs from the webmaster tool and inform Google.
-
Hi Sukhbir,
Currently, the best way I know of reporting that a location has closed is to go to this page:
https://support.google.com/places/
Click the red 'Contact Us' button.
Go through the wizard, choosing the 'my listing has incorrect information' and then the 'this business no longer exists' options.
Link to the URL of the Google+ Local page for the closed location, and in the additional notes section, explained that this branch of the business has closed, though the others remain open.
My understanding is that this does not completely delete the location from Google's system - there is currently no way to do so - but will prevent it from appearing for your service related terms. It may still appear for people searching specifically for that location, but will have a label on it stating that the business is closed. Not a perfect solution, but the best I know of that Google currently offers.
Beyond this, I would recommend that you manually remove as many third party citations of the business on other directories such as YP.com, Yelp, CitySearch, etc., so that you are getting rid of as much data as possible that supports the existence of the business.
Your website should be edited to remove absolutely all references to the closed location. Not sure about redirecting pages. My main goal would simply be to get rid of any references to the closed location.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Sukhbir,
What you could is redirect the C city urls to one of the closest locations so at least your users will know that location C is closed. You then could also add the URLs for location C to your robots.txt to make sure Google won't be crawling them anymore and stop indexing hopefully.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Reconsideration Request (Penguin) - Will Google give links to remove?
When Penguin v1 hit, our site took a hit for a single phrase (i.e. "widgets") due to the techniques our SEO company was using (network). We've since had those links cleaned up, and our rankings have not recovered. Our SEO company said they submitted a reconsideration request on our behalf, and that Google denied it and didn't provide which links we needed removed. Does Google list links that need removing if they are still not happy with your link profile?
Technical SEO | | crucialx0 -
My Old Domain is Not Changing in Google
I have taken over the following domain www.choice-cottages.co.uk, part of the contract was to re-direct the old site www.choicecottages.info to the new site. Unfortunately I am only a middle man in the arrangement as the website is hosted with another company. The switch was done well over 4 weeks ago, the re-direct itself is working fine. However if you google choice cottages you will see the first listing is www.choicecottages.info, then I have my new site below for a few listings. Google is definitely updating something as before the old domain had lots of site links but this has reduced to a few. Does anyone know anything on this, as in the past it only takes a couple of days to update. Many thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | iprosoftware0 -
Does anyone know how set up and use google plus for business
Hi i am trying to work out how to use google plus to increase brand awareness and to increase traffic to my site, but i am not sure how to do this. can anyone please give me step by step instructions on setting it up and using it to generate traffic please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Best way to change from one CMS to wordpress??
I have a client that was working with another SEO consultant and they pretty much dropped the ball big time! The SEO company took his site off of wordpress and put it on another CMS (http://www.wsinetsuccess.com/WSI-E-Fusion). My client would like to take hes site off of the WSI E Fusion platform and back onto wordpress. My question is how is the best way to going about doing this with out loosing all of the PR to the site? Should I find all of the URLs that are on the site and just 301 them to the right page? Thank you very much for your help.
Technical SEO | | pakevin0 -
Best way to do a site in various regions
I have a client who has 2 primary services in 4 regions He does mold removal and water damage repair. He then serves cincinnati, dayton, columbus, and indianapolis. Before hiring my company he had like 30 domains (keyword based) and had tons and tons of fake google places listings. He actually got a lot of traffic that way. However I will not tolerate that kind of stuff and want to do things the right way. First of all what is the best site approach for this. He wants a site for each service and for each city. indy mold cincy mold dayton mold dayton water etc etc etc In the end he will have 8 sites and wants to expand into other services and regions. I feel like this is not the right way to handle this as he also has another site that is more generic To me the best way to do this is a generic domain with a locations page and a page for each city. The for the Places he would get one account - an address that is hidden since he goes to customer locations, and just multiple city defined regions. He does have an office like address at each city. So should I make him a Places listing for each city or just the one? And of course how should the actual sites be organized? Thanks
Technical SEO | | webfeatseo0 -
Best Way To Handle Expired Content
Hi, I have a client's site that posts job openings. There is a main list of available jobs and each job has an individual page linked to from that main list. However, at some point the job is no longer available. Currently, the job page goes away and returns a status 404 after the job is no longer available. The good thing is that the job pages get links coming into the site. The bad thing is that as soon as the job is no longer available, those links point to a 404 page. Ouch. Currently Google Webmaster Tools shows 100+ 404 job URLs that have links (maybe 1-3 external links per). The question is what to do with the job page instead of returning a 404. For business purposes, the client cannot display the content after the job is no longer available. To avoid duplicate content issues, the old job page should have some kind of unique content saying the job is longer available. Any thoughts on what to do with those old job pages? Or would you argue that it is appropriate to return 404 header plus error page since this job is truly no longer a valid page on the site? Thanks for any insights you can offer.
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar
Matthew1 -
Google Webmaster Creation
When creating Google Webmaster Account is it advised to create 2 accounts for the 1 domain. one for non www and one for www?
Technical SEO | | daracreative0
