PO box address for mutli reagional website
-
Hi Mozers
I have a multi regional website which serves uk, india, china, usa and more.
I want to increase my rankings for the specific country. I dont have a physical address at the UK and in am thinking of getting a PO box address and have it placed on the UK version of the site and also at google places/+.
Will having a PO box address against physical address help me in getting better ranks and will i be penalized in any way.
Looking forward for the views
-
So glad to help, Hitesh!
-
hey thank you for the info. will def look at the article to gain more insights on the same.
-
Hi Hitesh,
I think it would be really helpful if you did a quick study of the Google Places Quality Guidelines I linked to in the earlier post to get a sense of eligible and ineligible business models. In sum, in order to qualify for inclusion in Google's local product, a business must meet all of the following criteria:
-
Have face-to-face transactions with its customers - either at the company's location (like a restaurant) or at the clients' locations (like a plumber).
-
Have a unique, non-shared physical street address - not a virtual office of any kind.
-
Have a unique, non-shared local area code phone number - not a toll free or call tracking number.
If a company cannot say 'yes' to all three of those points, then it should not seek local inclusion. Instead, the company should rely on organic SEO, social media and forms of marketing apart from Local SEO to attain visibility in its focus markets. Hope this helps!
-
-
What if its a proper street address and I dont have physical staff present there?
-
Hi Hitesh,
P.O. boxes are strictly forbidden by the Google Places Quality Guidelines (https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en), which read:
Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations.
Without a real, staffed physical location at which business is conducted face-to-face with clients or from which employees go to visit clients at their homes or offices, a business is not eligible for local inclusion. Instead, it must rely on Organic SEO in an effort to compete. Hope this clarification saves you future headaches.
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
-
New Website Old Domain - Still Poor Rankings after 1 Year - Tagging & Content the culprit?
I've run a live wedding band in Boston for almost 30 years, that used to rank very well in organic search. I was hit by the Panda Updates August of 2014, and rankings literally vanished. I hired an SEO company to rectify the situation and create a new WordPress website -which launched January 15, 2015. Kept my old domain: www.shineband.com Rankings remained pretty much non-existent. I was then told that 10% of my links were bad. After lots of grunt work, I sent in a disavow request in early June via Google Wemaster Tools. It's now mid October, rankings have remained pretty much non-existent. Without much experience, I got Moz Pro to help take control of my own SEO and help identify some problems (over 60 pages of medium priority issues: title tag character length and meta description). Also some helpful reports by www.siteliner.com and www.feinternational.com both mentioned a Duplicate Content issue. I had old blog posts from a different domain (now 301 redirecting to the main site) migrated to my new website's internal blog, http://www.shineband.com/best-boston-wedding-band-blog/ as suggested by the SEO company I hired. It appears that by doing that -the the older blog posts show as pages in the back end of WordPress with the poor meta and tile issues AS WELL AS probably creating a primary reason for duplicate content issues (with links back to the site). Could this most likely be viewed as spamming or (unofficial) SEO penalty? As SEO companies far and wide daily try to persuade me to hire them to fix my ranking -can't say I trust much. My plan: put most of the old blog posts into the Trash, via WordPress -rather than try and optimize each page (over 60) adjusting tagging, titles and duplicate content. Nobody really reads a quick post from 2009... I believe this could be beneficial and that those pages are more hurtful than helpful. Is that a bad idea, not knowing if those pages carry much juice? Realize my domain authority not great. No grand expectations, but is this a good move? What would be my next step afterwards, some kind of resubmitting of the site, then? This has been painful, business has fallen, can't through more dough at this. THANK YOU!
Algorithm Updates | | Shineband1 -
Whats the best method to tackle website traffic drop?
ON 14th November following a DNS error (which seems to have been a google error as local servers were not effected and it happened to many people everywhere) my traffic started dropping. Within 5 days it was down 50%. In a panic to resolve the situation I thought it was because i was on a shared host and moved to VPS which was a disaster. Ive had server errors since. After desperately looking everywhere for news on the DNS error and whether there as algorithm change etc I decided i should have a look at my site @ www.mutantspace.com and see if there were any internal issues. In Google Webmaster forum a helpful moderator suggested that I do 2 things: 1. Deal with the fact that I had keyword stuffed my <alt tags="">. Basically i run an arts blog so have 8 - 10 images per post and was putting the same text in each one i.e [artists name][artform][name of artwork]. I stupidly didnt realise what i had been doing and have since been deleting my alt tags for every image except one per post. However i have 17,000 images so its going to take a while. </alt> 2. She also linked me to https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.mutantspace.com%252F and wondered why i had such volatile inbound links. I dont know why. And cant figure it out As far as everything else goes I dont know what I could be doing wrong to deserve penalty - if it is a penalty. I dont back link so all my links are natural (from artists, galleries, art blogs, tumblrs, etc) I dont sell advertising (yet anyway) Having said that ive been told i have too many links on each page (i run a wordpress site and so have categories, etc) so im wondering if i should nofollow my categories? In short im wondering what advice anyone has on doing a systematic shake up of my site. Im currently doing the following: 1. deleting most of the <alt tags="">on my posts. Ive got back as far as 2012 and will keep going til theyre all done.</alt> 2. Redirecting all crawl errors 3. No Following more outbound links and links to social networks 4. Checking all inbound links to see if there is an suspicious domains 5. Sorting out the fact that ive had numerous server errors for the last 2 weeks (would that affect SERPS?) Is there anything else i can do? Should do? much appreciated
Algorithm Updates | | mutant20080 -
Using a sites custom code for multiple websites: good or bad?
Is it bad to utilize a custom codebase for multiple websites? Does that play a factor within Google? Also, what about hosting sites with the same custom codebase on the same dedicated server?
Algorithm Updates | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
How to find which keywords bring traffic to a particular page on my website ?
I have been using Google Analytics and SEOMoz tools for a while now. I know which are my top landing pages and some of the keywords which bring me traffic. But I don't know which are the top searched keywords for my website as these are "not provided" by Google Analytics. More importantly, I want to know which keywords are directing traffic to a particular page on my website. Can anyone help ?
Algorithm Updates | | EricMoore0 -
Why does Google Alerts call my website a blog?
Our company started a WordPress blog about 14 years ago. It has since added a third-party forum, a user-submitted photo gallery, and a huge database of searchable products. We also have almost 4000 posts. With all that said, Google Alerts often lists our content under blogs rather than websites. Sometimes it shows up in both? Does anyone know what criteria Google uses for determining the type of content, and how we can signal to them that we are a website?
Algorithm Updates | | TMI.com0 -
Why a terrible website ranks number 1??
Hi, I'm an SEO newbie. A couple of months ago I launched a new E-Commerce website for my client : http://www.corporategiftsshop.co.za The site has over 1000 pages indexed in Google. I've done some link building and on-page SEO for the keyword terms : corporate gifts
Algorithm Updates | | MarnusW
promotional items
promotional gifts Currently the website ranks number 31 for "Corporate Gifts" in Google.co.za What I cannot comprehend, is that the site which ranks number 1 is simply shocking! http://www.corporategifts.co.za/ It is a single, static webpage with all links pointing to another website : http://www.promogifts.co.za It has 1 back link and a page rank of zero, yet it still ranks number 1? Can anyone give me a reason or some insight into this as it has me stumped.. Some of the other sites in the top 5 are also poor, yet they still rank high. Our site has a Page rank of 5 and 67 unique domains which links to it ( according to our webmaster tools ) yet it still only manages a 31 ranking?? Any advise would be greatly appreciated as I need to make sense of this, otherwise hang up my SEO gloves.. Regards, Marnus.1 -
Having issues claiming a Google+ Business page (phone number not associated with business address)
When attempting to claim my Google+ account, it asks for the phone number. When I enter the number listed on my business listing, it says that number cannot be found... It then tells me to re-enter all my business info. If I do this, will I lose all my existing photos, videos etc.? Has anyone found this?
Algorithm Updates | | DCochrane0 -
What is considered duplicate content in an ecommerce website that offers the same product for retail and wholesale purchasing?
I have an ecommerce website that offers retail and wholesale products which are identical, of course with the exception of pricing. My concern is duplicate content. If the same product is offered under both the retail and wholesale category, and described identically, with the exception of price, metadata and a few words, is that considered duplicate content and would both pages be disregarded by the robots? Is it best to avoid the same description for that one product under the two separate categories? Thanks for all your help!
Algorithm Updates | | flaca0