Remove unwanted map in SERP
-
My company is based in Brighton.
We run courses in London.
If you search 'london business writing' in Google UK, you get this:
http://i39.tinypic.com/35me3qs.jpg
Lolwut. Google is placing a link for a map to our Brighton offices beneath the second result.
For a London-related keyword that links to a page for our London courses that contains an address for our London venue.
We are registered on Google maps as being based in Brighton; we also have a map of our Brighton office on our contact page. But obviously, this is not relevant to this search.
How do I get rid of this map for this keyword?
-
Bix, really appreciate you coming back to update this thread. Great that you had success! And, while we mustn't mix up correlation with causation, I'd say the effort you made is a very strong candidate for the causation of this. Well done! Again, thanks for taking the time to share your results. Could be very useful to others in the future who run into a problem like this. Miriam
-
I actually solved this problem with a very similar solution - using the address markup at schema.org
Thanks for putting me on the right track!
-
It worked! The map is gone. Looks like Google really does pay attention to those schemas.
-
It's worth trying, Bix. Hope it works out for you!
-
Hi Miriam
Thanks so much for taking the time to look so thoroughly into this!
If it's something I'm stuck with, I'll just accept it - for very similar relevant 'london [keyword]' searches I don't get the map.
That said, I'm hoping that specifiying the London address on that page with schema.org tags will prevent Google from displaying the map.
-
Hi Again Bix,
As I suspected, this may be difficult/impossible to have remove. My only good suggestion on this is to try using the Google Maps Troubleshooter to see if you can get some help that way, but I think you may be stuck with that link being generated by the algo:
http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/maps
Too bad there isn't a simple solution for this. Just one of those things where I wish there was more support!
Miriam
-
Hi Bix,
Thanks for the further info. You are very lucky to be showing up for that London search, given that you are not in London (i.e. you don't have a dedicated physical address there). The reason Google is associating that map with your business is because that is you company's real, registered physical address. Your screenshot is not of a set of local results, nor would you qualify for a real local result because of the lack of a dedicated address in that city. So, I'm afraid you are stuck with the map link to Brighton. I agree...that might confuse some users, but frankly, I would think that your awesome ranking outside of your city of location totally outweighs the downside of having that mapped link.
Sorry I can't tell you how to change this. Google displays what they feel is relevant, and for that search, they feel it's relevant to display your address.
I want you to know that I put a little feeler out amongst a couple of colleagues in Local to see if they have a different opinion on this. I didn't use your name or anything; just described the situation in general terms. If I get any differing opinions, I will certainly return to this thread, but I'm pretty positive any Local SEO will agree with my take on this.
Your site must have good traditional SEO and Local SEO factors to be doing so well for that term. You might like to read Linda Buquet's recent article on the Venice update...wonder if this could be the reason for your prominences in organic outside your true, physical location:
http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-venice-update-local-seo.html
Cheers!
Miriam
-
Just in case anyone finds this in future: I've tried adding the address markup here http://www.schema.org/PostalAddress
There's an unusually clear explanation of how to use this here: http://www.schema.org/docs/gs.html
If you have a basic understanding of HTML (esp div and span tags) you can learn how to do this fairly quickly.
-
I didn't know about rich snippets; thanks.
-
Hi Miriam
Thanks!
Our actual physical office is in Brighton. In London, we rent out a room. This room belongs to SOAS, a university.
-
Hi Bix,
Can you clarify for me whether you actually have a physical office dedicated to just your business in London - or are you sharing a building or something along those lines? That would be a start. Thanks, and by the way, love your screen name. I'm a big Bix fan.
Miriam
-
Perhaps you could add the London based address to all of the pages which Google is showing the map beneath the listing in the SERPs and mark the London address with rich snippets.
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
-
Wrong domain name showing in the SERP
I work with Axos Bank, and the domain name in the SERP started showing axos-services.com a couple of weeks ago. *As a test, search for [axos bank] in Google. You may need to click on "Search instead for axos bank" under "Showing results for axis bank" which is a whole separate issue we want to resolve. They do own axos-services.com, and it redirects to axosbank.com (along with a number of other domains). The SERP has always shown axosbank.com until recently, but the redirect has been in place for some time. Any idea why and how to prompt Google to show the correct domain? Thanks, all!
Technical SEO | | Gildej0 -
.xml sitemap showing in SERP
Our sitemap is showing in Google's SERP. While it's only for very specific queries that don't seem to have much value (it's a healthcare website and when a doctor who isn't with us is search with the brand name so 'John Smith Brand,' it shows if there's a first or last name that matches the query), is there a way to not make the sitemap indexed so it's not showing in the SERP. I've seen the "x-robots-tag: noindex" as a possible option, but before taking any action wanted to see if this was still true and if it would work.
Technical SEO | | Kyleroe950 -
Remove page with PA of 69 and 300 root domain links?
Hi We have a few pages within our website which were at one time a focus for us, but due to developing the other areas of the website, they are now defunct (better content elsewhere) and in some ways slightly duplicate so we're merging two areas into one. We have removed the links to the main hub page from our navigation, and were going to 301 this main page to the main hub page of the section which replaces it. However I've just noticed the page due to be removed has a PA of 69 and 15,000 incoming links from 300 root domains. So not bad! It's actually stronger than the page we are 301'ing it to (but not really an option to swap as the URL structure will look messy) With this in mind, is the strategy to redirect still the best or should we keep the page and turn it into a landing page, with links off to the other section? It just feels as though we would be doing this just for the sake of google, im not sure how much decent content we could put on it as we've already done that on the destination page. The incoming links to that page will still be relevant to the new section (they are both v similar hence the merging) Any suggestions welcome, thanks
Technical SEO | | benseb0 -
Product Images with organic results in SERP
Hey Mozzers, I've noticed that several of our product page results in Google have the product image associated with them. Today is the first day I've seen this. Does anyone know anything about these? Has Google put anything out about this? Here's a couple examples: http://content.screencast.com/users/Will_Swales/folders/Jing/media/08a16dcf-505e-443c-866d-fae6d805743e/2014-03-31_1031.png http://content.screencast.com/users/Will_Swales/folders/Jing/media/04972e7b-f6b2-4e78-ab11-95c52d69a200/2014-03-31_1056.png What's interesting is that they don't show for me when I use Chrome's Incognito mode. Any insights much appreciated! Will
Technical SEO | | evoNick4 -
Is placing content in sub directories better for SERP
Hi For small web sites with less than 6 pages Is there a benefit to structuring url paths using keyword rich sub directories compared to pages in the root of the site. for example: domainname.co.uk/keywordpagename.html or www.domainname.co.uk/keyword/keywordpagename.html which seems to have better rankings? thanks keyword
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Unnatural Link Warning Removed - WMT's
Hi, just a quick one. We had an unnatural link warning for one of our test sites, the message appeared on the WMT's dashboard. The message is no longer there, has it simply expired or could this mean that Google no longer sees an unatural backlink profile? Hoping it's the latter but doubtful as we haven't tried to remove any links.. as I say it's just a test site. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Webpresence0 -
How to create a tree-like structure map of a website?
Hi all, The online marketing manager requested to make a tree-like map of the website. He means that he would like to see a graphical representation of the website and his contents. This way we will be able to see if there are internal link issues. The problem is that there are thousands of pages and many subdomains, manual labour would make this a very tedious task. If you would get this question, how would you try to solve this? Any software recommendation?
Technical SEO | | djingel10 -
Google Dmoz description in SERPS
My dmoz description is not as KW rich as my sites normal description. IS there an advantage or disadvantage to either? If so, How do I prevent google from doing this?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610