Weird situation with our local listing.
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A couple of weeks ago I was having problems with my real estate local listing. I made some changes (like removing anything remotely like keyword stuffing and a few other things). Then, we re-emerged. But now, instead of having 4 citations we have 221. It looks like Google has merged our listing with all of the other agents in our office.
So, now if you type in to Google: ABC Realty in OurCity the very first listing is a 1-box that has our listing: Jane and John Doe, Sales Representatives, ABC Realty and our phone number. We actually rank higher than the ABC Realty office's own web page. We are getting phone calls from people who think they are calling the main office but instead call us. (This is not at all bad for business...but perhaps there is an ethical issue?)
My problem is that if you click on our places listing, there is one photo on there of a realtor who is not us. Additionally, we lost our two reviews that we had, but we have one review for another realtor who is not us. The rest of the listing is totally ours - our photos, our description, our website, our phone number. If I go to edit the listing, the option to remove that photo is not there.
So, now we have a conundrum. One one hand, it's great to have this boost. We are appearing #1 for searches for our office and this brings us business. But, I want to be ethical. Realtors can be nasty and I don't want other realtors thinking that I have done bad manipulative stuff to steal other peoples' business.
Can anything be done? What would you do?
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lol I expected to have to search harder than that but just goes to show how common a problem it must be (not that it's a problem for you by the sounds of things lol):
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That's happened loads, I've seen blogs and stuff about it all over the web. Can't remember if they found a solution or what it was but I'll have a look.
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Solution #2: They should hire you as their SEO.
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This is exactly what is happening. Our office has about 100 agents. It doesn't have its own local listing. Google thinks that our listing is the office listing.
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Since you're in real estate I would sell your office to ABC Realty for a hefty fee due to your office having prime Google SERP location.
Slightly more practical: If the corporate office submitted a bulk listing for its real estate agents and their own location make sure this is setup properly (http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173669) Or, they might not have done this at all, and Google is now considering you as the corporate office.
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