It does indeed Miriam, exactly what I needed. I new about the 20 miles radius, I even asked a few Google moderators about but I got mixed responses. Anyway, thanks!
Posts made by echo1
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RE: Google categories for local limousine service
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Unstructured citations
We all now how important citations are, structured and unstructured for local results. Oftentimes, as David Mihm said, they are the factor that could tilt the balance.
It is also true that the higher the authority of a website the more weight Google puts on a citation.My question is, how far should you go after those unstructured citations, would you get them from everywhere you can if the number and not the quality would be the difference between number 1 and number 2 spot in Google local?
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RE: NAP - Name on a local website
Maybe I should have been clearer, I was talking about the name in the website footer and contact page , where both have been created using schema.org
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NAP - Name on a local website
From a local perspective, if the legal name of the business is "Rising Realty, Inc", when you added in your footer should I loose the "Inc" part to be consistent with all the other mentions of the business across the web, which are without "Inc"?
Thank you!
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RE: Re: Competitive Link Comparison
I checked it also, everything looks fine to me.
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We currently do not support the location
Should I be worry that the link below returns that message? My listing is live and well, it can be accessed from anywhere except from Google places page, under "Respond to reviews
Owners can post a public response to **reviews **by Google users."Any thoughts?
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RE: Google+ Business Page Location Problem
Based on my interaction with Google map maker forum moderators, IF you run a SAB (service area business) you should do your edits ONLY in your Places claimed listing.
Can you provide more information about it?
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Google categories for local limousine service
I manage the Google places page for a SAB (local limousine company). The question is, should I add "taxi" and "airport shuttle service" as categories? I have listed only "limousine" and "car service' for now and I want to play it safe although those 2 are related to limo service. Sometimes people refer to limo service as "taxi service" or they are inquiring about prices for shuttle service to the airport and they end up booking the service quite often.
Does Google look to our website to find these words in the content? Google Analytics show lots of people are finding us through those two keywords as well although you cannot find the word “taxi" on our website. The interesting thing is that when searching for "taxi + my zip code" the company shows up 4th on maps results and when searching for "shuttle service + my zip code”, the company shows up 2nd on local results and also 2nd in organic results. Is this enough to make me add these 2 categories?
Second question is about the area served, does it make a difference (in rankings) if I choose “Distance from one location"over"List of areas served"? What happens is the red pin would be in a different location. If I choose "Distance from one location" the pin would be right in the center of the city (which I think it shouldn't matter anymore that much since the proximity to the centroid is not a ranking factor anymore). If “list of area” served is selected, (the city name will be chosen) then the pin would be about 5 miles West of the city center.
Any thoughts will be appreciated.
Thank you!
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RE: Mobile URL parameter (Redirection to desktop)
The page ending in ?m=off is non existent. We are using Joomla and such page does not exist and cannot be configured via canonical tags. Any other suggestion?
Thank you!
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Mobile URL parameter (Redirection to desktop)
Hello,
We have a parallel mobile website and recently we implemented a link pointing to the desktop website. This redirect is happening via a javascript code and results in a url followed by this paramenter: ?m=off
Example:
http://www.m.website.com redirects to:
http://www.website.com/?m=offQuestions:
- Will the "http://www.website.com/?m=off" be considered duplicate content with "http://www.website.com" since they both return the same content?
- Is there any possibility that Google will take into consideration the url ending in "/?m=off"? How should we treat this new url?
- The webmaster tools URL parameter configuration at the moment isn't experiencing problems but should we submit the parameter anyway in order not to be indexed or should we wait first and see the error response?
- In case we should submit this for removal... what's the best way to do it? Like this?
- Parameter: ?m=off
- Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? - doesn't affect page content
Any help is much appreciated.
Thank you! -
Pay Per Click Campaign Optimization
How much would you pay for a Pay Per Click Campaign Optimization? Our monthly budget is around $2k a month for Adwords.
Any advice in choosing the right company to run our Adwords campaign?
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Local SEO company
How important it is to choose a local SEO company based on their location? How can you check their reliability?
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RE: Google local
I am glad that you answered because I think you are the most experienced person on Seomoz when it comes to Google Local so let me share some information with you.
" If I knew the name and location of your business, I would begin searching for anything that associates your name with the listing." I already did that but I will let you do it as well. I found my name in Angie's List and Picassa. I will upload an image at the end with all the info.
This is my main problem: 9 months ago our old Google Places account disappeared from the radar completely due to a phone call from a Google employee asking about our location. I have been trying ever since to re-instate it with no success. I read all your posts on Seomoz about this, I checked Linda's website as well, I called Google verification line twice and I am no further than I was last year. The guys at Google told me that everything looks good, I am following Google's guidelines about hiding my address due to the nature of my business and that they see the listing it has been pending for a long time and they will escalate it to Google maps team, they also told me that I should be re-instated soon. I called back a few weeks after that, spoke with somebody else and he said the same thing about re-instating my listing but this time he verified my business again (he called our office while on the phone) and a few days later a got a post card in the mail from Google, pin verification! Prior to this, I have been in touch with a Google places forum moderator, we have exchanged a few emails but after a while he did not respond anymore. The funny thing is, I was closely watching one of my biggest competitors (who was having the same problem as i had) writing on Google forums and waiting to apply whatever they would advise him. This competitor got re-instated with a help of the same moderator (Keenan) that did not reply to my emails anymore after pointing out who and when he had helped).There is more to come...Reading over and over again about this competitor that managed to raise to the first position in Google Local for a number of very searched for keywords I have started to play with Google map maker and a few days ago, I realized that my G + business local listing had been removed a long time ago. I've edited the listing and submitted it for reconsideration and a few hours later, there I was! My G+ listing was live again but Google places is still under pending. I know that Google + local shows just the location of the business based on the pin on the map, it does not influence the local SERP's in any way. The good part about this is that I got all my 30 reviews back which I have work hard for. The bad part of course is that my Google Places listing is still under Pending.
I have done everything the best I could, I researched this subject to the point where I don't know what to do anymore, I read Mike, yourself, Linda and other knowledgeable people's thoughts about the subject and I feel that I just hit a wall.
Being a member here helped me achieve great results, there is so much good information on this website that is literally impossible not to succeed if you follow it. I need to be in Google local due to the nature of my business but, there is no advantage for being on first page in Google for more than 10 strong keywords when I know that my organic listings will be below 6 or 7 local results. Isn't this ironic?
I am not even sure if what I do is the right thing anymore, can you point me in the right direction?
Thanks!
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Google local
If you perform a search in Google maps for our company and you are not signed in, it returns our Google + page, with reviews, photos, directions and about tabs, which is fine but, when you click on any of the photos, there is a window that opens to the right where you can edit the location where the photo has been taken, a comment box, photo details and above all, right at the top, MY NAME! Why my name? This is the business page, I don't want people to see that. The snip is below.
Thanks!
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Mobile website content
What is the point of optimizing (on-page SEO) a parallel mobile website if the mobile search results are taken from the general (desktop) index?
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RE: Do I need incoming links to my mobile site, if I want to rank for mobile search?
hey Steve, are you still standing by what you said above?
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RE: Mobile SEO? Do we need it or not?
Is your mobile site ranking as well / at all when searching from a mobile device?
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Parallel mobile website
After researching and comparing desktop keywords vs mobile keywords, I came to the conclusion that they are pretty much the same, with minor variations. The new keywords for mobile website do not have a great potential for bringing in much traffic.
If I don't want to go after those new mobile, do I need to build separate links to our parallel mobile website (URL) to rank better or the link building for my desktop website would be enough to rank for my parallel mobile website as well?
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Mobile website strategy
Hello all! This question is about mobile websites. Any suggestions are welcomed.
The facts: We have recently built a mobile website for our business using the separate mobile urls (parallel mobile website on a m. sub-domain). We are in the service industry and while our customers are most of the time on the go, it is important for them to find the price and order the service as fast and easy as possible. The redirect from desktop to mobile happens when customers are accessing the website with a mobile devices and it's done automatically. The mobile version does not have any content and serves only as a search and order function. The SEO has been made for the desktop website only and we are ranking really well for all competitive keywords in our niche. We want to keep the mobile website simple and clean so we are not planning to add any content on it.The questions:
- Since we are not planning to have much content on the mobile website, do we need to do any SEO for it? If yes, why? What are the benefits?
- Should we add content on the mobile website and why?
- Is there any down-side from an SEO perspective due to the fact that the website redirects to the mobile version? How are the inbound links going to behave in this case?
- Do we need to link these two websites although there is no risk about duplicate content? (links, canonical tags, sitemaps)
- Will the mobile website take advantage of the link building made for the desktop version?
- Should we allow the mobile website to be indexed having the fact that this is just a search & book tool? (at the moment it is blocked via robots.txt)
Thanks for reading, looking forward to your answers.
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RE: Mobile Site & SEO
Hi Cyrus, I hit the same road block and I was wondering if you still stick to your comment above for 2013.
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RE: Got an SEO package, paid $400+ for it, basically got scammed.
I thought I would update your answer...
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1
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RE: Minimum Page Rank to get a link
Let me rephrase the question by adding "if the domain is strong and relevant to your site". In my mind that was obvious...sorry.
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Minimum Page Rank to get a link
Is there a minimum Page Rank that we have to be aware of when looking to get a link from a webpage?
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RE: Are press releases a form of paid links? Matt Cutts on paid links
I understand, I have done myself in the past too but I am not a big company at all. How I see it, most press releases are done to be picked up by bloggers and writers who will take them one step further and write about them if they are interesting enough. Do you really think that if all press release networks will still survive if they have to apply the no-follow attribute to all the links in their content? I don't think websites like PRWeb or PRNewswire (to name just a few that most people know about it) would charge hundreds of dollars for a press release with a no-follow link. I think you are referring to what it a press release suppose to be, a short and informative piece of writing. Nowadays, I think for most people has this become just another way of getting links back to your website.
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Are press releases a form of paid links? Matt Cutts on paid links
According to Matt Cutts latest video about paid links everything that allows Page Rank to pass through is considered paid link and is against Google's rules. I think this is geared more towards directories but aren't 90% of press releases just another form of paid links? You pay to game the system, to manipulate the search engines. He goes on to say that if you "nofollow" the link there will be no penalty. It will be interesting to see how much their revenues will decrease if all press release websites & article distribution networks will have to nofollow their outbound links. He makes it very clear that paid ads are different because they do not manipulate search engines in any way.
What do you guys think?
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RE: Google Places: "We currently do not support the location"
Hello and sorry for the delayed response.
Bottom line: problem solved!
Thanks to the information you provided, we followed the article listed here: http://www.localseoguide.com/hey-seos-if-google-maps-calls-dont-answer/
then the one listed here:
http://www.localseoguide.com/the-non-place-place-use-case/Andrew Shotland's case was similar with ours so we just followed through. Apparently the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" in Google Places account must be checked and then resubmit your listing to Places Troubleshooter. It took about 15 minutes and our listing was back online as it was before. With small exceptions like West instead of W and Road instead of Rd. Weird thing is that even the "Do not show my business address..." is checked, on the listing you are still able to see the full address (not logged in).
This raises a few questions:
- Should we dare to edit our listing? What if we get back to the same problem?
- Can the "Road vs Rd" and "West vs W" affect us in rankings for Google Places?
- Could have been just a bug?
Thank you very much for your help, much appreciated!!
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Google Places: "We currently do not support the location"
Does anybody know what is going on with this message? Instead of our Google Places page, we get the above message.
To be mentioned that Google representatives called our business to verify this listing 2 times this week...
Anybody got the same problem?
Thanks!
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RE: Template change, huge drop in rankings
Hi Keri, as far as I could tell, it was a combination of things : template change, content change (more than 50%), Title change, new structure/layout of page, new elements/functions added...we basically changed the website. As far as the off site optimization is concerned, I don't think it had a major impact. Our link building was on track, a couple of annual paid directories expired but none of them was so important to have caused the drop, not even combined and I did not renew them. We are now pretty much were we were before the drop but we had a couple of big press releases that I think helped us too.
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Bing free mobile website
When editing my Bing business listing, I have noticed that they offer a free mobile website. I was actually looking to build one and I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for. I want to be able to customize it as well. Anybody tried it already?
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RE: Local listing | Virtual office
Thanks Simon,
"So long as that exact same real address is not shared with another business" Did you find that this is against Google's guidelines?
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Local listing | Virtual office
Hi Miriam (and all Local SEO mozers), I read a couple of your answers where you advice people in different situations not to consider a virtual office when creating their Google Places listing and I would like to know if you would apply the same advice in my case. This is the scenario: I have a client who's in the limousine service in Orlando, he just bought the URL and registered the business with the City using a "virtual office" in Orlando. This virtual office provides him a physical address, local area phone number, 411 listing, a listing for the businesses in that building and an office to have his meetings. This is the part where it gets confusing when I read your answers and I will give you an example. You said here:
_The requirements in order to qualify for a Google Place Page are that you have: __1. A legal business name__2. A local area code phone number__3. A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you or from which your employees depart in order to serve customers at their locations (think chimney sweep, landscaper, etc.)_Number 3 says "A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you".
My client is going to rent one of those virtual offices, which does have a physical address, on as-needed basis. This office actually does exist. Why would Google have anything against it?
One of the reasons why he chose that location is because he is running the business from home and he does not want the clients to see it.
Another reason is the image he wants to create for his company by having a different address where he can hold meetings and such. The phone number will be either a local land-line or a local cell phone number, in any case, it will be a _local area code phone number. _
So this is where we stand: he dispatches the cars from home (he does not have a garage, the cars stay with the drivers 24 hours) but he meets his clients and business partners at the other address. There is nothing fake about it, he does have a legal business name, a local area code number and a real place where customers come to do business with.Which address should I use for his Google Places listing?
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RE: Ranking Penalty in Google Places for Primary Cell Phone Number?
What about having a local an a 1800 number? Would that affect the local rankings too? About 2 -3 years ago, having a 1800 number listed meant that you are a trusted business not just a flight-by-night company with its cell phone as their main number.
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RE: Facebook, Google Plus - What to share/like?
Are you saying you are not using "Likes" and "shares" at all?
_"Will lobbying take over SEO and SERP's? Just like Washington politics, will the bigger and deeper pockets wield the influence" . _
I'm not into politics, I'm just trying to rank my website.
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Facebook, Google Plus - What to share/like?
Hi everybody!
We are planning to offer an incentive to all our customers who interact with us on social media websites. What's the most important thing to ask from a customer?
Facebook
- to like our Facebook business page or to like our own website through Facebook?
- to just follow us on Facebook or to actually comment / interact on our wall?
Google +
- to +1, share, add to circle our Google+ business webpage or to +1 or share our own website?
So basically what do we need to promote most? Our Facebook / Google+ business pages or our own website through social media marketing? While we understand it's important to actually interact with the customers and offer value on social media websites, we are looking to boost our SEO efforts.
Thank you!
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RE: Local citations | Local search
I actually try them too for a while about a year of so ago but somehow I forgot about them.
Thanks for the quick reply!
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Organic ranking vs Local ranking
After reading this blog entry from Dr Pete on Mirametrix, my question would be:
What's more important for a local company, being in the 7 pack or in the top 10 organic results? Which one attracts more clicks?Is the optimization for local ranking just became more important than the traditional SEO?
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RE: What is the optimal link profile?
Try to focus more on those competitors who don't have an exact match domain, it's much harder to rank when your URL does not contain at least a partial match. Google still puts a lot of weight on exact match domains.
I would focus more on creating valuable content and post them on your site or use websites like Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon to get the word out. Put a snippet on those sites and the rest of the article on yours. In addition, if you can share it with minded-like people, such as through Facebook, I'm sure that will improve the results.Try googling with industry-relevant keywords and advanced search operators to find sites that Google itself currently sees as authoritative, which are also publishing guest articles, then try submitting your articles to them if your website doesn't attract to many people.
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RE: Local citations | Local search
Thanks Miriam
For citations I used Whitespark probably more than a year ago, with little success, maybe they fine tuned it since then, I will give it a try again.
As far as the reviews are concerned, we are already doing that, following up with the customers and asking them to post their reviews online . We figured Google, Yahoo and Yelp will help us the most so these three are the only options the customers have to leave reviews although I must say, I was expecting a greater number of reviews. Do you have any resources where I can learn how to craft those emails about reviewing our services?
On the other hand, I am not sure if even with lots of real reviews and citations we will be able to penetrate the 7 pack due to reasons that I just discovered, reasons which I will explain in a new question once I finish reading all the material. In short is about how Google is ranking companies in Google Places and what is it doing to verify that the information those companies are providing (and which helps them rank so high) is accurate.
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RE: Local results without geotargeted keywords
Do you know if Google is counting the reviews based on their IP address? Most of my competitor have fake reviews and I suspect they use their own computers to do that.
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Local citations | Local search
What is the best way to find local resources to gain reviews and citations from to help with strengthening your position in Google Places?