Travel agents are creating Google Place pages for our properties - is this a bad thing?
-
I'm currently trying to develop a clear understanding and policy for my company on how we deal with Google place pages, specifically where we stand on places pages being created by our agents.
We run a business in the travel industry with a number of locations around the world. Our services are sold via travel agents. Naturally, we set up places pages for each of our locations but recently we've noticed agents setting up places pages for these locations with different titles & their own contact details (same address though). In one case we've received verification postcards which we've been asked to pass on.
The pages are set up in 'good faith' to promote business in the agents respective countries and languages but i'm concerned that we are ending up with multiple pages for the same location, hurting our brand, losing our own pages through being buried and ending up with our account being suspended at some point down the line.
There are a number of terms on Google guideline page, in particular, this one:
"Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts."
I contacted my Adwords account manager but didn't get a very clear response on this.
What i'm looking for is some 3rd party, definitive advice/opinions on this scenario. Should we be asking agents not to create place pages? Why should they list.. could it end up hurting both of us? Are there pros and cons to this or is it a clear cut case?
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for this! Apologies, i'm being a little cautious about saying too much about the industry as this is a delicate situation at the moment! Essentially a travel agent and hotel chain might be a close comparison where the travel agents are creating places pages claiming the hotels more or less as their own. As you say, merging pages might become a real problem. I guess managing pages for each agent is a huge amount of work but would be the only real way of keeping any sort of control - it would still leave us with the issue of merging and in any case, i don't think our agents would actually subscribe to this.
Anyway, many thanks for your help, it's given me a lot more to think about for sure, especially your interpretation of that particular guideline.
-
Greetings, Cane,
Not understanding exactly what the service is that your company and its agents provide, I'll use an example from another industry: the real estate industry. You will know from my example whether what I'm describing applies to your business model.
Let's start with Google's Places Guidelines. The language in the guidelines applicable to the real estate agency (and I'm hoping your own business) is this:
Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the office.
(emphasis mine)
So, a real estate office with 10 realtors working with in can have 1 listing for the business itself, and one for each agent.
These are the official guidelines.
That being said, due to weaknesses and bugs in Google Places, there has been a historic problem with multiple listings sharing the same address but having different data in areas like the business title, phone number field, etc. Merging of the listings can happen so that you might end up with the main listing having the phone number for Agent #6 instead of the direct office number. Reviews for Agent #3 may end up on Agent #4's Place Page. And, yes, you might encounter your main office being outranked by the individual agents' listings.
Your task is to develop a company policy regarding how to handle this, knowing that merging is indeed a real danger, but that the benefits of each agent having his/her own Place Page can also mean increased overall visibility for your whole business. You need to determine whether you will allow agents to have their own Place Pages and whether these will be controlled by you (within your own Places account) or whether every agent will be given the keys to create their own listing under their own steam). Both routes have potential benefits and pitfalls. For example, if you control the listings, you control their data and will also be able to realize if anything becomes penalized or problematic. On the other hand, managing a large number of listings (especially for an International business) is a very big job, indeed. Do you have the time to do this, or would it be better to make it company policy that each agent control his own listing?
I can't make the decision for you, but these are the issues you need to consider in coming to a final decision as to how you want to handle this complex scenario.
Hope this helps!
-
Thanks for the input Dejan! My issue though is that we already have an official (or canonical - at least we'd hope it is) place page set up for each of our locations using one account. Our agents are setting duplicate pages up in different languages. Potentially, there could be 20 plus pages with different descriptions but all for the same location/business. This would only happen of course if we passed the postcards on to them. In some cases, though, the page was validated through a different phone number, so we have no control in this case.
-
I always go for centralised option and manage all listings via one account, usually set up in batch if it's hundreds of locations. Having it all in one place provides a single point of control and performance monitoring. Alternative would be to provide guidelines for your agents on how to set up quality listings that maximise their presence through content and completeness.
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
-
Page optimised and SEO ranking
Hi SEO is new to myself and I'm still trying to get my head round it. My friend and myself run a DJ company in our spare time but we are desperately trying to rank higher to increase our visibility. we have worked hard on our page optimisation and scoring high 90's, we'd love to invest in someone to do it, but simply dont have that kinda cash at the moment. I'm aware that some pages need meta description and alt image text, which is what I'm now working on, but even other sites with lower percentage are ranking higher. is this due to recent changes and google not ranking our pages? Will our ranking improve over time and how long should it be before we see any changes.
Branding | | Bluice0 -
Legacy Locations and Google Local - How to Handle
Hello - I'm working with a client who has some transitioning brands - and they're hesitant to change the legacy branding in Google Local and on their website because they're afraid of losing traffic from the old brand. Is there a standard practice for keeping traffic on the old brand terms, while still adjusting to the new branding on Google/Yahoo/Bing? Thanks,
Branding | | WebTalent0 -
Google is sticking it to E-commerce Companies right?
Hi all, Excuse the rant - but I'd be interested to hear others thoughts on this... I am completely disheartened by the Google Algorithm updates of the last 18 months. They seem to be completely geared up to making life much much harder for E-commerce companies to rank organically, and much easier for informational sites to rank organically, with the only exception being national or global brands that have millions of pounds to invest in off-line marketing like TV advertising. Is it not all a devious strategy by Google to ensure e-commerce companies have to pay for their traffic? It seems like if you genuinely want to compete organically as an e-tailer, without investing millions in off-line advertising, you basically have to become a publishing house as well as shop. My company sells building supplies. There are plenty of magazines and info-sites out there offering tips, advice, interactive tools etc. for how to build your own home, home improvement advice etc. But if I want to start getting 'natural' links, I have to become an online magazine and information resource as well and start competing with these other reputable info-resources - where is the sense in that? If house-builders want advice and information on building regulations, planning permission etc. they'll visit government information sites and other reputable online resources to get that information, if they want to buy materials they'll go to a shop. It just seems like Google is trying to make every site an information resource - how else are you supposed to get natural links without publishing 'sharable' information - no-one shares links to products really, well not building materials anyway - maybe sexy products like ferrari cars and super-duper laptops or sound systems, but no one is going to go "oh that's a really nice piece of timber, I'll share that with all my friends before I buy it". Just feels like it's getting harder and harder and more and more expensive to trade online. What's everyone else think? Luke
Branding | | LukeyB301 -
Loop-hole to Google's Penguin update? Anyone else have some input?
So I have this theory and I’m wondering if anyone else has some input. I believe I have found a loop-hole to Google’s Penguin update. Let me explain. I work for a pretty competitive party planning company. Our biggest competitor for search is also our bread and butter to our company, our consultants. In addition to outside competitors trying to manipulate business from those consultants. Anyways, one of my top priorities is to not only rank for multiple pages on our site, but to also have our social sites rank on the first two pages. Recently I have watched a spamming MLM YouTube video review of our company crawl up the YouTube charts and out rank us for our Company name in YouTube search. And now, this week, the video has crawled up to rank 3<sup>rd</sup> behind our main site and Wikipedia for our brand keyword! So how does a YouTube video that is simply a review out rank us for our company name in our social platforms? Mind you he is also outranking our core social sites of which we have thousands of comments and interactions on per day? Looking at all of the metrics of the video, according to how I believe ranking to work in Youtube, there is no way this guy should be ranking as high as he is. The video has a decent amount of copy, it has fewer than 10,000 views, 76 thumbs up, 5 thumbs down, fewer than 2,000 subscribers and his channel only has 12 videos. It wasn’t until I was looking at our search results in Seomoz that I realized what this guy was doing to move up so quickly in rankings. He has 1,671 linking root domains to his video. He has been building excessive links to this video on Youtube. Well, since Google isn’t going to penalize its own website, the old technique of excessively building links to one page… seems to be working. Has anyone else come across something like this? Where building excessive links to a video or other social platform substantially has increased rankings?
Branding | | ScentsySEO0 -
How to increase page authority and domain authority? [Ecommerce]
How can I increase my Ecommerces Domain and Homepage Authority? My competition have 60-70 page Authority and it's time I try to compete.
Branding | | InkCartridgesFast0 -
How to get Google to link external review sites in Google Places
Hi, I have several company profiles in Google Places and Google Sites, I also have the same profiles for those companies in review sites like Yelp! and so on. I have seen that other sites have links on the bottom where Google points to those external review sites, but that doesn't happen for me yet, is there a way to tell Google that I have profiles on other review sites so they can link them or is it Google whenever they find them that will link them? Here's an example: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=14126341780178539960&hl=en At the bottom you'll see that it says: Reviews from around the web Now this is one of mine: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=12168877126282825032&hl=en Now how do I get that line at the bottom provided that I know there are reviews out there in other sites? Is there something I can do? Or is it all about Google doing it whenever they see fit? Thank you!
Branding | | tass0 -
Can creating a subfolder and seperate domain blog build external links?
So I am currently going through the creation of a blog with a client that has a company that sells tennis equipment. I have talked to their development team, who is a third-party ecommerce platform, and come up with an idea to create an sub-folder (domain.com/blog) with an article page using their existing framework that would feature full articles in a blog format. Then I would create multiple blogs for them using tumblr and wordpress with their company name and a few with unique names targeted to their niche. These would feature snippets of the content taken from their article page (domain.com/blog) with some responses or reviews on the full articles to further their outreach and then link to the main articles on their article page. These snippets would be divided up amongst the blogs and posted on different days of the week to divide the traffic. Each blog will feature fresh content and focus on a rotating schedule of the latest videos, re-blogs, memes, photos, highlights, scores, upcoming tournament reviews, etc. I will set each one up to rotate through these different topics on different days and times to create a steady stream of traffic. I want to make sure that I stress the fact that I wont be stuffing the unique blogs with links only to the clients company store, I will be making sure to keep it to an amount that isn't spam worthy. Now if these blogs feature rich content including the snippets of the articles from my sub-folder page (domain.com/blog) will these blogs pass link juice to the blog set up on my sub-folder? Also is this a good way to ensure brand awareness and create external links without damaging their reputation? Are there other risks that people have encountered by doing something similar? Please share your experiences so I can make an educated decision.
Branding | | cscoville0 -
Ranking Videos on First Page of Google
Hey Guys, My videos are doing well on YouTube with lots of views and comments (about 1.5 million views). Nevertheless, I can’t manage to get them to appear on Google’s first SERP for my branded keywords. What am I doing wrong? What in your opinion are the major ranking factors for YouTube videos? Thanks!
Branding | | ShivaS0