Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We have been watching this for a while. In our research we have tried linking to the citation sites, and have had little success. There is no doubt that the principles of places ranking are related to, but not the same as normal organic.

Reviews are very helpful, and next to the normal important areas (profile completeness, address and others) I would put reviews as top priority. Not only on Places, but Yahoo, Insider pages, city search, yelp, Angies, and even customer lobby. I am sure there are more.  Recently Places started displaying reviews from the Places accounts owners web site. Seems if you use reviews or testimonial in the URL  they may pick that up. This may be an attempt on Google's part, to slow down the number of duplicate reviews. (Those with ears , let them hear). <- not sure what I mean, but I have only had one cup of coffee so far.

Look at the simple fact, that you will rarely find a places account on the 2nd or 3rd page of results that have a significant amount of reviews.

We have stopped using the "usually suspects" for citations, as in the last 5 months they seem to have little value. What we do see working is citations on other "local"  sites.  Not directories, but  related local sites. Much harder work, but Google likes it when we work hard for a citation or link... right?

PS-  We are not all that large in SEO, just do local clients , so our research is very limited.

Very common Tactic.  I would say use your resources building great content on your main site, and you will see a better return.  The question you are asking really comes down to a point of view, and then math.

A bunch of sites, with little or no juice, will help a little.  A bunch of links back from Blogs. Sites, and social media will pay off big time if you can create the interesting content. Interesting is:

"something that concerns, involves, draws the attention of, or arouses the curiosity of a person"

So I would ask this question.  What is it you can do with the current web site that will create Interest.

We do a lot of Local seo, and have found that Google is just not showing the citations this year that they did last. We also have researched enough of the citations to see that they are not showing up as links either.  Our thought is Google has stopped indexing many of these pages.

Last year we could count on 8-10 local citations on Places using the normal mix.  Since February of this year, only ONE of those directory listings has shown up as a citation or link.

We now use completely different strategies on citations.  We work on getting on local blogs, as well as other small business sites in the city.  The other clear trend we see, is if you want to have a well ranked site in Places the direct causation (after having a places account of course)  is PA of the sites home page.  We looked at ten local categories and the rankings on Google (Places and first page). Simple,  in the VAST majority of cases the rankings fall right in line with PA ranking.

The days of Local rankings being a significantly different system than organic SEO seem to be gone.

I see a lot of answers to questions in here that I would consider pretty umm, well, not all that great, not that I am one to judge, but when I ask a question I am looking for answers from experienced professionals.

How do you decide which answers to take more seriously?  I check the persons profile and follow it all the way out the their site and blogs (if listed).  Sometimes I see sites that have a SEmoz of 10. How can you give advice when your site has no Ranking?

I know there are going to be exceptions, and that this isn't the one and only indicator, but how do you decide how much confidence you can put in an answer here?

EGOL,

I know how Google values a link.  Leave 1 billion dollars in unmarked bills in the public parks waste basket at 1:00  A.M.  and I will send the exact method to you...

Or...  just pay me $129.00  a month and we will guarantee you the FIRST PAGE of Google.

Great answer Ryan!  I would only add a small comment, that being that their is some evidence that no follow links can (and in the case of twitter and other social media) may pass Juice. We are running an experiment on a new site using 90% no follow to see the results.

Good discussions from everyone, thank you!  I had several motives in asking. One was of course to get all of your views, and they did confirm my intrinsic thought process, and the second was the test the assumption that only individuals who where pretty good at all this would answer (this proved to be true) and therefore giving me some insight into feeling more confident when I read your responses on here, and the last was to get more points, because I really like free stuff*.

• the later statement is a a partial truth.

Link wheels in the past have been very effective.  We see them all the time in the link profiles of small SEO firms (or I should say local SEO firms).  Some have built much of their rankings on them.

I am not going to preach here,  we all have strayed no and then into the less "white hat" areas of SEO ( Except us, if Google is reading this ;))

Marcus makes a valid point.  If you are going to be an SEO you have to decide what type of SEO you are going to be. Link wheels are considered cheap and amateur tactics, that have a short self life.  In our research it appears it's like a drug addiction. Once you start, you can not stop or the rankings start to fall.  So you get stuck in the endless cycle of building cheap links to cheap web sites, and then one day you will wake up and Google and Bing will have completely discounted all your work.

Why not look for and express great ideas.  Great content is the starting point. A calculator, a contest, a tips, a cartoon, any thing that will make the clients site more attractive to be bookmarked.

I feel your pain. We have all been there. But do at least consider the more experienced voices on here.

Mine too!

What a great idea! You may start a new trend here Dejan.  Maybe you can add a "buy it now"  amount  and make it easy on us.

I'd go for the one with the best DJ passed.

I think you can find a great deal of information on Ranking Factors by searching through this site. Our experience is that Back links control about 70% of your ranking.  Keep an eye on your pages PA, and how it compares to your competition

Here is a great blog on Ranking factors: .

www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Our reports still show 5-06-11, so I assume we are all still waiting.  You can use several free back link tools to see if your links are indexed.  Try link diagnosis.com  ( you need firefox and the plug in) or link back watch.  Links will show up there pretty fast (same day if Google indexed it). Google web master as well of course, and yahoo site explorer.

We have several clients that need this type reach.  Using an "in your Area" navigation link, and then as stated bt EGOL  and bookworm,  doing a community page for each city works pretty well.  So one page listing the communities, and a page linked to that page with each cities information.

The only other point I would make is you will need to add some serious link's and citations to the site, and the individual pages will need some attention as well.  Reviews from customers noting the city are very helpful as well.

Hi Gary,

We have lot's of multiple location clients. Are you trying to get visible in Google places or organic, or both?

You are doing it the correct way. Make sure your individual office pages have unique content. You also want to make sure each office has it's unique phone number listed.  The golden rule of multiple locations on the same site is be very clear on each having a unique phone number, address, and third a page.

If you are using Google places follow there guidelines on each listing. And try and get unique listings on Yahoo local and other local directories for each office.

It is a tough question.  We have been down this road, and found that in the end, it has to be unique content. It's really challenging to ask a client who is not a writer to write, just as it is difficult to ask a writer to be a dentist.

We use a combination system at times.  We send a q and A sheet to the client on different topics. We then have a professional writer turn it into a page or article.

I agree with EGOL, and would add, we have several successful SEO clients that if you look at the keyword volume of there services, it's to low to even show up.  Bigger ticket, needs less volume.  Smaller ticker, lot's of volume.

In our experience if you are going to have more than a few landing pages (for whatever reason)  don't optimize them, and do "blocked from accidental indexing by robots.txt"  As EGOL  states.  You will find yourself in Optimization heck if you have a bunch of pages fighting for the same basic keywords.

We all get to "deal" with these type situations from time to time. Your question is of course impossible to answer, but I would say you are putting all your eggs in the back link basket. If you are faced with a competitor who has a zillion low quality links, you may need to look for other traffic opportunities.  SEO is ultimately about getting quality traffic to your clients site. If your client see's it as nothing more than a rankings competition, you are in deep trouble.

Using the new opportunities in Social media , as well as searching out and finding the best quality links, and building highly creative on site content ( Tips, Calculators, Cartoons, Educational video, Forums , contests)  may go alot further than building links 24 hours a day.

I feel your frustration,  we all do.

Trying to force a search engine into indexing a page is a losing tactic. Having been down the social media profiles path, in my opinion, (and based on our limited research) it's far better to focus your energy on a few high profile social sites (Twitter, face book, linked in)  and do so from the non SEO approach. Give great information, interact,  and meet interesting people and businesses.  The SEO effect will follow.

Having your clients Face book comments shared is far more important than having 250 social profiles.  Let's face it, if you can buy 100's of social media profiles for $5.00  how valuable can that really be?

One of our major challenges with clients is convincing them that the easy road in SEO  may head up for a while, but always seems to end with a long slow and ugly decline. (a mountain road metaphor)

Go for Quality!  Think like there is no Google or Bing and your SEOo will produce better and longer term results.

While I have seen temporary rating boasts with social profiles,  unless the account is used as intended,  and grown, those ratings disappear pretty fast.

I think Google has an almost impossible task, that being to determine the quality of over a trillion web pages (and of course growing) using technology to do it, which is the only possible tactic they could use.

Looking at their recent moves, I think they are trying to get the user communities to help determine the quality of sites through the 1 + button, and the move to recognize social media signals ( and the Chrome browser changes).

I think that Google would like to reflect a non capitalistic, democratic  ranking system, with safe guards for the new and smaller pages.  Like our government was set up to do. And I think they are moving that direction.

The problems with this goes to the human condition.  There are many who will always try and take advantage of a system (because we are capitalists at heart and that brings out the best and the worst in entities) and that Google is trying to find the balance between a capitalistic approach and a democratic approach. I don't think they can.

Ultimately the rankings are, in general today, controlled by money. Those entities that have money to spend on SEO and Internet Marketing are rewarded based on how wisely they spend that money.  The results are not all that different than the old world Yellow page model. Big money, big advertisement,. first page. Limited budget,and you better find other ways to promote your service/product.

Even with the new changes, the 1+ and all that, lots of smart people will still be looking for ways to take advantage of them, and will undoubtedly find a few ways.

So all we can do, is decide what we are individually, and what tactics we will use to

to represent the side of the fence we choose to stand on.

( Bring in theme music here)

Wouldn't life be great if Google Places just had a customer service department?  I think we would all be willing to pay a service fee, just to get someone on the line.

That said.  I agree with Aaron. Before you do, we are seeing problems with residential addresses,  when the places account www is the same as the others.  (Like a franchise main site).  So you may want to look at-

Make sure the address and phone is unique.

Make sure every locations address and phone number is on the URL used in places, and clearly marked.  Home page and contact page are important. You may want to have individual unique pages for each location if you don't.

Add the location city or ID into the name.  Example.  Paul's Shoe Box Aurora

Extreme measures may include developing a individual site for the locations with a unique URL.

Good luck!

Great answer Ryan!  I would only add a small comment, that being that there is some evidence that no follow links can (and in the case of twitter and other social media) may pass Juice. We are running an experiment on a new site using 90% no follow to see the results.

In general we have found that if a local site has a significantly higher PA or DA  and no Local places account it will rank above the Maps.

Good discussion. I have a time crunch, so right to my 2 cents.  Isn't the real point of publishing on E Zine is to have a well written article republished on other sites, and therefore the juice is not from e zines but the sites that pick up the article?

We have used lot's of different tactics.  It depends on the the type of business.  A contractor may want to send a thank you card with a $5.00  Starbucks certificate thanking the customer and then asking them to review them on one of the various review sites.

What works better is sending an email to the customer with a LINK  and instructions.  Most sites require they sign up or in to review a company.  Let them know exactly what to expect before they click.  Our emails are several paragraphs with easy instructions.

Good luck!

Simple answer, Yes.

We have found doing it in house is more cost effective, and can be very productive.

Spend the money on a well written piece of content to add to your site. Much better investment.

Ditto Bevelwise. We see Page Authority as gaining much more rank this year. Link's from pages with low page authority seem to have very little effect.