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Well technically this is not correct - from what I understand Product Display ads are paid inclusion so SEO ranking factors still play a part of appearing or not appearing

Well technically this is not correct - from what I understand Product Display ads are paid inclusion so SEO ranking factors still play a part of appearing or not appearing

Completely disagree - the business is a national plumbing franchise so doesn't have physical offices/locations in every suburb/city they service.

There are a handful of the bigger franchisees within the group who have dedicated offices but most are locally owned businesses, 3-5 staff operating 2-3 vans and trucks and don't have a dedicated office in the location they service. On top of that the company has a 1300 number that goes to a central call centre so again no individual numbers per location. (The franchises are all individually owned companies not owned or run by the master franchisee)

Google Places deals with this scenario very poorly and mobile businesses very poorly in general - right now our new strategy is working well so running with that until Google can come up with a better solution.

To update this thread, finally starting to see feeds being approved. We use kissinsights on a lot of client sites and google is classify this as a popup and has rejected some feeds based on this. It seems if we setup a feed, have kissinsights disabled and wait 1-2 weeks it gets approved. If not approved within two weeks, logging a support ticket seems to get it sorted within a few days.

Thought I'd post an update on this thread - we setup the central listing located at HQ and added all the suburbs/cities the franchise services. Not showing in any searches apart from those where HQ is located which confirmed what I thought would happen.

Right now we're looking at scrapping all listings, starting from scratch and adding each suburb at the franchise owners home address and hiding the listing. Big job to manage but no other way to do it at this stage....costing the company big $$ with these listings out of action, GOOGs really needs to come up with a better way of verifying listings.

So Google Shopping has finally landed in Australia so we've got some work todo hooking it up to our client ecom sites.

Right now we have a handful of clients who are setup, the feed is getting in their ok but all products are sitting in "disapproved" status in the dashboard and clicking into each individual product the status says awaiting review.

I logged a support ticket with Google to get some more info on this as it doesn't look right to me (ie the disapproved status in dashboard) and got a useless templated answer.

Seems that if I switch the country destination to US the products are approved and live in google.com shopping search within the hour. Switch back to Australia and they go back to disapproved status.

Anyone having the same issue/seen this before? I simply don't trust Google support and wondering if there's other factors at play here.

Thanks for the replies guys.

Have done quick a bit of trawling on this and so far no loopholes that I can see any more. Surprised there's not more about this in discussion forums as would imagine that other franchise businesses face similar issues.

Going by the rule book and google TOS seems the only way legit way to do is setup the single listing at HQ add the franchise locations in the coverage list areas but my feeling is the rank will be pretty weak compared with other competing local places listings who are highly optimised around that location & location specific terms, although leveraging user reviews over the long term would potentially resolve this.

Waiting on the postal verification so will report back how we go once live and then with a handful of reviews.

Did you add both www.tmart.com and tmart.com to webmaster tools?

If you just added tmart.com, add the WWW variant too which may sort you out.

Depending on the type of listing, well optimised Places listings could help significantly, particularly if you can get your client to work with their clients to post reviews on the listings.

In almost all cases where we've actively engaged the client, more reviews and high rated reviews helps us easily outrank competitors - a single review where there was none before often gets our Places listing on the first page of serps for some of our target keywords.

So we have a client who is a plumbing franchise with about 150 franchisees across the country.

Because its a plumbing franchise the businesses don't have street addresses (apart from the franchisee home addresses but we don't want to use those)

We used to have bulk uploaded listings for the franchise locations and used the GPO address is the suburb/city as the address and got away with this fine for years. Google has copped onto this and asked for reverification of the listings by post now. So my question is what's the best way to optimise places for 150+ locations.

As a quick fix, we're going to add a new places location as the master franchise HQ office (address exists). We can then add all the suburbs/areas serviced into this location which may or may not show up for local searches in those areas.

We could potentially verify all listings by mail by using private mailboxes but mail verify on a mass scale like that is likely to be flaky not to mention an admin nightmare.

Does anyone have an experience with this and how they got around it?

So we have a client who is a plumbing franchise with about 150 franchisees across the country.

Because its a plumbing franchise the businesses don't have street addresses (apart from the franchisee home addresses but we don't want to use those)

We used to have bulk uploaded listings for the franchise locations and used the GPO address is the suburb/city as the address and got away with this fine for years. Google has copped onto this and asked for reverification of the listings by post now. So my question is what's the best way to optimise places for 150+ locations.

As a quick fix, we're going to add a new places location as the master franchise HQ office (address exists). We can then add all the suburbs/areas serviced into this location which may or may not show up for local searches in those areas.

We could potentially verify all listings by mail by using private mailboxes but mail verify on a mass scale like that is likely to be flaky not to mention an admin nightmare.

Does anyone have an experience with this and how they got around it?

Thought I'd post an update on this thread - we setup the central listing located at HQ and added all the suburbs/cities the franchise services. Not showing in any searches apart from those where HQ is located which confirmed what I thought would happen.

Right now we're looking at scrapping all listings, starting from scratch and adding each suburb at the franchise owners home address and hiding the listing. Big job to manage but no other way to do it at this stage....costing the company big $$ with these listings out of action, GOOGs really needs to come up with a better way of verifying listings.

Completely disagree - the business is a national plumbing franchise so doesn't have physical offices/locations in every suburb/city they service.

There are a handful of the bigger franchisees within the group who have dedicated offices but most are locally owned businesses, 3-5 staff operating 2-3 vans and trucks and don't have a dedicated office in the location they service. On top of that the company has a 1300 number that goes to a central call centre so again no individual numbers per location. (The franchises are all individually owned companies not owned or run by the master franchisee)

Google Places deals with this scenario very poorly and mobile businesses very poorly in general - right now our new strategy is working well so running with that until Google can come up with a better solution.