Changing the city of operation and trying to know the best way of informing Google
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We are having a business operating out of three cities A, B and C with A being the primary address and the business provides its services in B and C as well. Business has decided to shut shop in C and instead add D as another city. Currently the URLs are like www.domainname.com/A/productswww.domainname.com/B/productswww.domainname.com/C/productsPlease help us in understanding the best way to inform google that City C is non operational now.Do we need to do the redirects, and if yes, should we do the redirects to Home Page?Or can we just remove the C city URLs from the webmaster tool and inform Google.
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Hi Sukhbir,
Currently, the best way I know of reporting that a location has closed is to go to this page:
https://support.google.com/places/
Click the red 'Contact Us' button.
Go through the wizard, choosing the 'my listing has incorrect information' and then the 'this business no longer exists' options.
Link to the URL of the Google+ Local page for the closed location, and in the additional notes section, explained that this branch of the business has closed, though the others remain open.
My understanding is that this does not completely delete the location from Google's system - there is currently no way to do so - but will prevent it from appearing for your service related terms. It may still appear for people searching specifically for that location, but will have a label on it stating that the business is closed. Not a perfect solution, but the best I know of that Google currently offers.
Beyond this, I would recommend that you manually remove as many third party citations of the business on other directories such as YP.com, Yelp, CitySearch, etc., so that you are getting rid of as much data as possible that supports the existence of the business.
Your website should be edited to remove absolutely all references to the closed location. Not sure about redirecting pages. My main goal would simply be to get rid of any references to the closed location.
Hope this helps!
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Hi Sukhbir,
What you could is redirect the C city urls to one of the closest locations so at least your users will know that location C is closed. You then could also add the URLs for location C to your robots.txt to make sure Google won't be crawling them anymore and stop indexing hopefully.
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