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
-
SERP Ranking Page Filp Flop Confusion
Hello all, I've been having some weird stuff going on between one of my landing pages and the Homepage. What's happening is, the page showing up in the SERP keeps flip-flopping, but not only that, when it flips to the landing page it will drop 70 positions. Then when it flips back to the homepage it goes back to around position 19. So confused about what is happening. I think the two pages are fighting for the same keyword as they both have the keyword in the meta title. Homepage >( <title>PresenterMedia - PowerPoint Templates, 3D Animations, and Clipart</title> ) Landing Page >( <title>PowerPoint Templates at PresenterMedia.com</title> ) I've seen other answers about the flip-flopping thing, but not sure about dropping 70 positions thing that is going on. Does this huge drop tell me the better page to rank is the homepage instead of the landing page this targeting this keyword? Any help would be greatly appreciated
Technical SEO | | JbonesPM0 -
Spammy Structured Data Markup Removal
Hi There, I'm in a weird situation and I am wondering if you can help me. Here we go, We had some of our developers implement structured data markup on our site, and they obviously did not know what they were doing. They messed up our results in the SERP big time and we wound up getting manually penalized for it. We removed those markups and got rid of that penalty (phew), however now we are still stuck with two issues. We had some pages that we changed their URLs, so the old URLs are now dead pages getting redirected to the newer version of the same old page, however, two things now happened: a) for some reason two of the old dead pages still come up in the Google SERP, even though it's over six weeks since we changed the URLs. We made sure that we aren't linking to the old version of the url anywhere from our site. b) those two old URLs are showing up in the SERP with the old spammy markup. We don't have anywhere to remove the markup from cause there are no such pages anymore so obviously there isn't this markup code anywhere anymore. We need a solution for getting the markup out of the SERP. We thought of one idea that might help - create new pages for those old URLs, and make sure that there is nothing spammy in there, and we should tell google not to index these pages - hopefully, that will get Google to de-index those pages. Is this a good idea, if yes, is there anything I should know about, or watch out for? Or do you have a better one for me? Thanks so much
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Is Removing Breadcrumbs Detrimental for SEO?
We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu. i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops) Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.
Technical SEO | | AliMac261 -
One page of the site disappeared from serp for a month now
Im working on a clients site and been promoting a specific page to a keyword. started to move up the ranks and exactly a month ago on the 19/5 ( on the same day of the last update) updated the main page im working on with new content and published some other new pages on related subjects that all are linking to the main page im working on ( without the same anchor text in the links ) on the same day i found out that because of a technical error the new content was published on 5 other pages of the site and obviously created a duplicate content issue and i removed all the duplicates on the same day , i assume G caught this thing and punished the site for the duplicate content issue but : when i search the page directly with site:...i can find it. its been a month since i fixed all issues that i thought could impact the page..no duplicate content on the site. no KW stuffing. no spammy links to the page. everything seems fine now my question : why is my page not showing ? how long should i wait before giving up and creating a new page .? how come my site has not lost any organic traffic ( apart from that specific page ) ? is it possible to penalize only one page ? can i recover from this at all ? thanks
Technical SEO | | nira0 -
My site was Not removed from google, but my most visited page was. what does that mean?
Help. My most important page http://hoodamath.com/games/ has disappeared from google, why the rest of my site still remains. i can't find anything about this type of ban. any help would be appreciated ( i would like to sleep tonight)
Technical SEO | | hoodamath0 -
We're no longer turning up in Google SERP for our brand search when we used to be #1 after our site update. Any ideas why?
We recently updated our website and during the push, someone mistakenly 301 redirected "www.brandx.com" to "brandx.com" instead of the otherway. Since then, our website no longer turns up for the search "brandx" on Google. We have reversed the mistake a few days ago, but we're still not turning up, and we used to rank #1 in Google SERP. Could it just be due to timing between the crawls and that our www. site didn't make it in Google's index due to this mistake? We have submitted our new sitemap to google a couple of days ago as well, as a side we're still showing up #1 in Bing's results however. And it should still show up based on SEOMoz's SERP report. Any help would help as I'm growing increasingly concerned.
Technical SEO | | JoeLin0 -
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 -
SERP Meta Dependant Upon Search Query (strange Google bug?)
Hi, I have on-page optimised a client's website Now take a look at the Title Tag & Meta description of the front page. This is the correct updates I have made - Title: Practice Management and Financial Consultants to the Health Industry
Technical SEO | | LukeyJamo
Description: Award winning Health and Life have been providing accounting, tax and practice management services for Medical, Dental, Allied Health businesses. Now, take a look when the business name is Googled. Notice how the Title Tag switches back to the original, yet the Description Tag is Correct. Now, take a look when the owner's name is Googled. The Title Tag is now correct, but the description is incorrect. Ive set the preferred URL to be the www version Ive spent ages in the custom CMS trying to find what could be causing this The developer says it's a "Google Thing" Anyone have any ideas?0