Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do I get rid of rogue listings?
-
Unfortunately, Google has taken bits and pieces of my business and combined it with non-existent businesses and other rogue information. So now my business has 3 locations.
One proper listing that I created and manage.
One that uses my website address but nothing else is correct in the listing.
One that contains my name(incorrectly), but the address and everything else about it is incorrect.
I have reported these places many times but they continue to hang around and I am lost/confused on what to do next.
Please advise.
-
Hi Dignan,
The appropriate thing to do in cases like these it to go through the REPORT A PROBLEM link at the bottom of each problematic Place Page. It's a good idea to be signed into your account while doing this. Describe the situation and link to the correct listing for your business in the wizard. State that you have only one address - the one on your authoritative listing. Ask that these 2 other listings be removed.
Wait 4-6 weeks to hear back from Google (could take considerably less time these days, actually). If you do not see resolution, then take the matter to the new Google Places Help Forum. The new forum will be here:
http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/maps
Explain the steps you have taken and ask if a Top Contributor can please help you obtain resolution.
*In your shoes, I would also do some sleuthing to try to figure out where the other data is coming from...it's coming from somewhere and discovering the origin may help you to surmise what is going on.
Hope this helps and good luck!
Miriam
-
As you have your listing I would suggest that you continue to try and get those listings removed by reporting it to Google.
One way that you can demonstrate that your verified listing is the "credible" and only one is through local citation linkbuilding and getting people to place reviews on your listing.
The more activity will show hopefully push the other two down in SERP's and eventually be removed from Google.
Good luck,
Vahe
-
HI Brent,
Thanks for the reply. As of last week the phone numbers were different on the rogue listings, but I just checked...and guess what...both now have MY phone number.
So it looks like I could claim them. It was advised that the best way to deal with these listings would be to just report them to Google, opposed to claiming them.
They mentioned it was against the rules for me to have more than one listing(even if my intention was to nix the two rogue listings.)
Care to share your input?
-
This may be obvious but you haven't mentioned it. Did you try to claim the listings? Or are they already verified and claimed by somebody else?
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
-
If I get spammy backlinks removed is it still necessary to disavow?
Now there is some conflicting beliefs here and I want to know what you think. If I got a high spam website to remove my backlink, is a disavow through search console still necessary ? Keep in mind if it helps even in the slightest to improve rankings im for it!
Technical SEO | | Colemckeon1 -
Getting rid of pagination - redirect all paginated pages or leave them to 404?
Hi all, We're currently in the process of updating our website and we've agreed that one of the things we want to do is get rid of all our pagination (currently used on the blog and product review areas) and instead implement load more on scroll. The question I have is... should we redirect all of the paginated pages and if so, where to? (My initial thoughts were either to the blog homepage or to the archive page) OR do we leave them to just 404? Bear in mind we have thousands of paginated pages 😕 Here's our blog area btw - https://www.ihasco.co.uk/blog Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
Technical SEO | | iHasco0 -
How can I get a photo album indexed by Google?
We have a lot of photos on our website. Unfortunately most of them don't seem to be indexed by Google. We run a party website. One of the things we do, is take pictures at events and put them on the site. An event page with a photo album, can have anywhere between 100 and 750 photo's. For each foto's there is a thumbnail on the page. The thumbnails are lazy loaded by showing a placeholder and loading the picture right before it comes onscreen. There is no pagination of infinite scrolling. Thumbnails don't have an alt text. Each thumbnail links to a picture page. This page only shows the base HTML structure (menu, etc), the image and a close button. The image has a src attribute with full size image, a srcset with several sizes for responsive design and an alt text. There is no real textual content on an image page. (Note that when a user clicks on the thumbnail, the large image is loaded using JavaScript and we mimic the page change. I think it doesn't matter, but am unsure.) I'd like that full size images should be indexed by Google and found with Google image search. Thumbnails should not be indexed (or ignored). Unfortunately most pictures aren't found or their thumbnail is shown. Moz is giving telling me that all the picture pages are duplicate content (19,521 issues), as they are all the same with the exception of the image. The page title isn't the same but similar for all images of an album. Example: On the "A day at the park" event page, we have 136 pictures. A site search on "a day at the park" foto, only reveals two photo's of the albums. 3QolbbI.png QTQVxqY.jpg mwEG90S.jpg
Technical SEO | | jasny0 -
Do YouTube videos in iFrames get crawled?
There seems to be quite a few articles out there that say iframes cause problems with organic search and that the various bots can't/won't crawl them. Most of the articles are a few years old (including Moz's video sitemap article). I'm wondering if this is still the case with YouTube/Vimeo/etc videos, all of which only offer iFrames as an embed option. I have a hard time believing that a Google property (YT) would offer an embed option that it's own bot couldn't crawl. However, let me know if that is in fact the case. Thanks! Jim
Technical SEO | | DigitalAnarchy0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Unnecessary pages getting indexed in Google for my blog
I have a blog dapazze.com and I am suffering from a problem for a long time. I found out that Google have indexed hundreds of replytocom links and images attachment pages for my blog. I had to remove these pages manually using the URL removal tool. I had used "Disallow: ?replytocom" in my robots.txt, but Google disobeyed it. After that, I removed the parameter from my blog completely using the SEO by Yoast plugin. But now I see that Google has again started indexing these links even after they are not present in my blog (I use #comment). Google have also indexed many of my admin and plugin pages, whereas they are disallowed in my robots.txt file. Have a look at my robots.txt file here: http://dapazze.com/robots.txt Please help me out to solve this problem permanently?
Technical SEO | | rahulchowdhury0 -
What tools produce a complete list of all URLs for 301 redirects?
I am project managing the rebuild of a major corporate website and need to set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. The problem is that the old site sits on multiple CMS platforms so there is no way I can get a list of pages from the old CMS. Is there a good tool out there that will crawl through all the sites and produce a nice spreadsheet with all the URLs on it? Somebody mentioned Xenu but I have never used it. Any recommendations? Thanks -Adrian
Technical SEO | | Adrian_Kingwell0 -
How to use overlays without getting a Google penalty
One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period. Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal. Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay. What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe? We are considering the following approaches: First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards. No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty? Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking? I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0