Managing Google Map Location for a remote wilderness lodge
-
Hi all, I’m working on a Google Maps and Google Plus issue for a client who runs a unique, very remote wilderness lodge. The lodge isn’t located near any road -- you have to fly 100+ miles on a small plane.
Their mailing address is a PO Box in a dingy little town 100+ miles from their actual mountain location. Therefore, Google maps and Google Plus think the lodge itself is located in this little town, and it shows them there on maps. That’s bad, because the kind of guests who come to this remote lodge wouldn’t want to stay in that little town.
We would like Google to understand that the lodge’s location is not the same as its mailing address. We have the GPS coordinates for the actual location.
My question is: how do I get Google Plus and Google Maps to correctly show the lodge pin at its GPS location on the map, rather than in the town that hosts its remote PO box?
Thanks for reading! Any insights?
-
Hi Bzmark,
Thanks for the clarification. The reason I asked is that it isn't permitted to create a Google+ Local page for a non-staffed vacation rental. Sounds like you're in the clear, as far as that's concerned, with this lodge.
I feel that Tim has correctly assessed this situation. There are multiple issues here.
-
P.O. boxes are not allowable addresses, so at some point, someone created a Google+ Local page (and likely other citations) for a location that is in violation of the Google Places Quality Guidelines.
-
Google's local product is mailing address-based - meaning that it is intended to feature data about businesses with physical addresses at which mail is received and to which humans come. While humans do come to this lodge, mail apparently doesn't come to it, taking it outside of Google's definition of a true local business and making it an unlikely candidate for local inclusion.
-
Since the lodge doesn't receive mail at its remote location, it would be impossible for it to receive a postcard for the purposes of verification, again, making it ineligible.
So, I think where you are at right now is that your client's business name exists within in Google's local product when it should never have been included in the first place, lacking a mailing address that would be legitimate in the eyes of Google. The client's location is being misrepresented by Google, and there isn't a clear path for cleaning this up, because there is no genuine mailing address to substitute in a cleanup campaign.
If the wrong location is misrepresenting the business and misleading customers, you could try to get the page deleted, but I think the best thing to do here would be to go through the Google MapMaker and Google And Your Business fora to see if you can make direct contact with Google staff for guidance with this matter. Typically, I would be sending you through a troubleshooter like this one (https://support.google.com/places/) but as you don't have a legit mailing address, it won't get you very far.
I think your only hope is direct contact with Google staff, who may either help you remove the listing or may allow you to edit it in some way. They won't be happy about the P.O. box, of course, but they may have some solution for you that will ameliorate the fact that the business is currently being misrepresented and is potentially misleading customers.
In the meantime, I do like Tim's suggestion of creating a custom Google map to embed on your website so that, at least, the website is properly directing guests to the location.
In sum, the business model is not appropriate for inclusion in Google's local products and your task is to do all you can to prevent potential guests from being misdirected.
-
-
Thanks for your suggestions! I have a feeling this is the way I'm going to end up going. If so, I will post back re: what works.
-
Hi Miriam, thanks for asking. It's a hotel.
-
Hi Bzmark,
May I ask for a little clarification on the business model. By 'lodge' do you mean a hotel (i.e. a staffed location to which guests come) or is this a one-off vacation rental (i.e. a single, un-staffed cabin out in the woods)? Please clarify.
-
Hey there,
That's a tough situation and to be honest I don't know exactly what you should do. Technically, you shouldn't be able to create a Google Places page for a business that only has a PO Box. They do this because they only want to list businesses with physical locations, but you do have a physical location - it's just somewhere else.
Anyway, I have a couple ideas. One is to edit the pin drop on your listing. If you edit the address for your listing, there should also be an option to edit the marker location (see attached). Just drag it to the appropriate spot.
If that doesn't work, you could try logging into Google Map Maker, requesting an edit to your location information and then leaving an explanation for the reviewers.
And if that doesn't work, you could just create your own custom map. This wouldn't change the information Google has about the business but at least you would be able to link to it from your website and show customers the actual location.
Hope this helps!
Tim
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
-
My website is my name. Overnight it went from being the number one google search to not showing up at all when you google my name. Why would this happen?
I built my website via square space. It is my name. If you google my name it was the number one hit. Suddenly 2 weeks ago it doesn't show up AT ALL. I went through square spaces SEO check list, secured my site etc. Still doesn't show up. Why would this happen all of the sudden and What can I do? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jbark0 -
Html language deprecated by Google?
Hi Mates, Currently we are using on our site two tags for language (we are targeting english ) .... and these are defined on the head section, my question is it is required by Google in order to rank well or it is deprecated. Thank you Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayRey0 -
Is google seeing "all" my homepage?
Hello All 🙂 Since launching my new website design - www.advanced-driving.co.uk I am not convinced Google is seeing all the content on the page. I took a long extract of text and did a search on Google and nothing was found. Also although in the search results for "advanced driving course" I can see the new title tag, the snippet isn't showing.. Is there anyway I can check this? As a scroll down I can see the URL changes ie: www.advanced-driving.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robert78
then:
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-3
then:
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-4
then:
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-5 Is this right? Thanks in advance..0 -
Citation Sources for Google Places when located in Europe/Middle-East
Hi All, To get citations to back up Google Places listings for Europe or Middle-East based companies, what directories or places is it possible to have your business address, name and phone number listed? Perhaps we could compile some listings here. Unfortunately most of the articles and citation sources for Google Places point to local city directories in USA like Yelp, Citysearch etc. which we are not eligible for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
How to Block Google Preview?
Hi, Our site is very good for Javascript-On users, however many pages are loaded via AJAX and are inaccessible with JS-off. I'm looking to make this content available with JS-off so Search Engines can access them, however we don't have the Dev time to make them 'pretty' for JS-off users. The idea is to make them accessible with JS-off, but when requested by a user with JS-on the user is forwarded to the 'pretty' AJAX version. The content (text, images, links, videos etc) is exactly the same but it's an enormous amount of effort to make the JS-off version 'pretty' and I can't justify the development time to do this. The problem is that Googlebot will index this page and show a preview of the ugly JS-off page in the preview on their results - which isn't good for the brand. Is there a way or meta code that can be used to stop the preview but still have it cached? My current options are to use the meta noarchive or "Cache-Control" content="no-cache" to ask Google to stop caching the page completely, but wanted to know if there was a better way of doing this? Any ideas guys and girls? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Is Google mad at me for redirecting...?
Hi, I have an e-commerce website that sells unique items (one of a kind). We have hundreds of items and the items are rapidly sold. Up till now I kept the sold items under our "sold items" section but it started to get back at me as we have more "sold" than non sold and we are having duplication problems (the items are quite similar besides to sizes etc.). What should we do? Should we redirect 100 pages each week? Will Google be upset with that? (for driving it crazy) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Google indexing flash content
Hi Would googles indexing of flash content count towards page content? for example I have over 7000 flash files, with 1 unique flash file per page followed by a short 2 paragraph snippet, would google count the flash as content towards the overall page? Because at the moment I've x-tagged the roberts with noindex, nofollow and no archive to prevent them from appearing in the search engines. I'm just wondering if the google bot visits and accesses the flash file it'll get the x-tag noindex, nofollow and then stop processing. I think this may be why the panda update also had an effect. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0 -
What are the different tactics for getting ranked/ included in Google finance searches such as http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=NASDAQ:ADBE
I don't know what ranking factors they are using for this feed. The results vary greatly from a search done at google.com or google.com/news and google.com/finance I'm working with a website that regularly publishes finance-related news and currently gets traffic from google finance. I'm wondering what we can do to optimize our news articles to possibly show more prominently or more often. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemascaro0