Google + pages and SEO results...
-
Hi,
Can anyone give me insight into how people are getting away with naming their business by the SEO search term, creating a BS Google + page, then having that page rank high in the search results. I am speaking specifically about the results you get when you Google: "Los Angeles DUI Lawyer".
As you can see from my attached screenshot (I'm doing the search in Los Angeles), the FIRST listing is a Google + business. Strangely, the phone number listed doesn't actually take you to a DUI attorney, but rather to some marketing group that never answers the phone.
Can anyone give me insight into why Google even allows this? I just find it odd that Google cares so much about the user experience, but have the first result be something completely misleading. I know it sounds like I'm just jealous (which I am, a little), but I find it disheartening that we work so hard on SEO, and someone takes the top spot with an obvious BS page.
-
Good Morning!
Unfortunately, the results you are seeing are consistent with a tweak Google made a few weeks back that has brought up some extremely low quality one boxes. The tweak is surfacing many old, spammy results like the one you've highlighted. Here are two good discussions of this weird phenomenon:
The above forum thread in 8 pages long, and I recommend you read the whole thing, as it includes many examples and, also, some things people have tried in regards to reporting the bad results.
Then, I would also suggest you read Mike Blumenthal's article in which he ties this tweak to the Hummingbird Update. Very smart:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/09/28/hummingbird-local-knowledge-graph-shitty-search-results/
And, if you'd care to read more on this topic, you might want to take a glance at:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/NMh_bk5MXX0
The problem is very widespread. Google is aware of it and I expect they will turn the dial again at some point to improve what is currently a very poor search experience. There may be some hope in reporting a specific instance, as you will read about in Linda Buquet's forum thread, but for the most part, this may just be one of those sit-tight situations that we have to endure until Google takes action. Hang in there.
-
In the second column of the Google+ listing, you may have noticed the Report A Problem link.
There are several options provided plus "Other". "Place does not exist or is private" may be the best choice but you have options.
I agree that tactics like these stain SEO and the SEO industry. Every industry needs feedback like you've provided!
-
If you see the new bar in your Google+ account that asks you to claim your custom URL then do that and if not here is the URL to get started with Google+ custom URL https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2676340?rd=1.
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 deindex a page then will Google stop counting those links pointing to it?
Hey everyone, I am deindexing some posts of my website as I think they are not providing any value to the users. My question is that if I deindex a post and it has some good quality links pointing to it, will google stop those links counting for my website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bunnypundir0 -
What is the best structure for paginating comment structures on pages to preserve the maximum SEO juice?
You have a full webpage with a great amount of content, images & media. This is a social blogging site where other members can leave their comments and reactions to the article. Over time there are say 1000 comments on this page. So we set the canonical URL, and use Rel (Prev & Next) to tell the bots that the next subsequent block of 100 comments is attributed to the primary URL. Or... We allow the newest 10 comments to exist on the primary URL, with a "see all" comments link that refers to a new URL, and that is where the rest of the comments are paginated. Which option does the community feel would be most appropriate and would adhere to the best practices for managing this type of dynamic comment growth? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HoloGuy0 -
I think Google Analytics is mis-reporting organic landing pages.
I have multiple clients whose Google Analytics accounts are showing me that some of the top performing organic landing pages (in terms of highest conversion rates) look like this: /cart.php /quote /checkout.php /finishorder.php /login.php In some cases, these pages are blocked by Robots.txt. In other cases they are not even indexed at all in Google. These pages are clearly part of the conversion process. A couple of them are links sent out when a cart is abandoned, etc. - is it possible they actually came in organically but then re-entered via one of these links which is what Google is calling the organic landing page? How is it possible that these pages would be the top performing landing pages for organic visitors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Incorrect cached page indexing in Google while correct page indexes intermittently
Hi, we are a South African insurance company. We have a page http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle which has a 301 redirect to http://www.miway.co.za/car-insurance. Problem is that the former page is ranking in the index rather than the latter. The latter page does index occasionally in the same position, but rarely. This is primarily for search phrases like "car insurance" and "car insurance quotes". The ranking was knocked down the index with Penquin 2.0. It was not ranking at all but we have managed to recover to 12/13. This abnormally has only been occurring since the recovery. The correct page does index for other search terms like "insurance for car". Your help would be appreciated, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | miway0 -
Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
Hey folks, How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls. These pages are super low competition. The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal) a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned. b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them? c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned? d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google. Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info. 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Search results all going to home page
I'm an author, and after doing a search for one of my books I realized that no matter what was searched, the user was getting lead to the homepage. please see the attached picture. How do I fix this and is this hurting my SEO? Capture.JPG Capture1.JPG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Google top results API / scraper?
Hi, Does anyone know of an API/scraper that would allow you to get the top N Google search results for a given query? Ideally the results would be "neutral" (no personalization, no localization, etc.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
Does Google count links on a page or destination URLs?
Google advises that sites should have no more than around 100 links per page. I realise there is some flexibility around this which is highlighted in this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru One of Google's justifications for this guideline is that a page with several hundred links is likely to be less useful to a user. However, these days web pages are rarely 2 dimensional and usually include CSS drop--down navigation and tabs to different layers so that even though a user may only see 60 or so links, the source code actually contains hundreds of links. I.e., the page is actually very useful to a user. I think there is a concern amongst SEO's that if there are more than 100ish links on a page search engines may not follow links beyond those which may lead to indexing problems. This is a long winded way of getting round to my question which is, if there are 200 links in a page but many of these links point to the same page URL (let's say half the links are simply second ocurrences of other links on the page), will Google count 200 links on the page or 100?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SureFire0