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
-
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 -
If I'm using a compressed sitemap (sitemap.xml.gz) that's the URL that gets submitted to webmaster tools, correct?
I just want to verify that if a compressed sitemap file is being used, then the URL that gets submitted to Google, Bing, etc and the URL that's used in the robots.txt indicates that it's a compressed file. For example, "sitemap.xml.gz" -- thanks!
Technical SEO | | jgresalfi0 -
What are best options for website built with navigation drop-down menus in JavaScript, to get those menus indexed by Google?
This concerns f5.com, a large website with navigation menus that drop down when hovered over. The sub nav items (example: “DDoS Protection”) are not cached by Google and therefore do not distribute internal links properly to help those sub-pages rank well. Best option naturally is to change the nav menus from JS to CSS but barring that, is there another option? Will Schema SiteNavigationElement work as an alternate?
Technical SEO | | CarlLarson0 -
Schema Markup for property listings (estate agent)
Hello, I've been looking online for some help with this. An estate agent has a page of properties for sale. Is it possible to mark these individual properties up and if so would they appear as rich snippets in the SERPS - never seen anything like this for properties for sale so just wondered,
Technical SEO | | AL123al1 -
How can I Style Long "List Posts" in Wordpress?
Hi All, I have been working on a list-post which spans over 100 items. Each item on the list has a quick blurb to explain it, an image and a few resource links. I am trying to find an attractive way to present this long list post in Wordpress. I have seen several sites with long list posts however; they place their items one on top of the other which yields a VERY long page and the end user has to do a lot of scrolling. Others turn their lists into slideshows, but I have no data on how slides perform against 10-mile-long-lists which load in 1 page. I would like to do something similar to what List25.com does as they present about 5-10 items per page and they seem to have pagination. The pagination part I understand however; is there a shortcode plugin to format lists in an attractive way just like list25?
Technical SEO | | IvanC0 -
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 -
Struggling to get my lyrics website fully indexed
Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research! My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website. Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now. My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed. I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed! I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google. Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!
Technical SEO | | SEOed0 -
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