Hi SearchParty,

If these are all real physical locations to which customers come to do business or from which staff goes to serve clients, then my rule of them is to include up to eight of them in the footer, properly marked up using Schema. There should also be a unique page on the website for each location.

Hi BBuck,

You've received some thoughtful replies here. I'm going to throw in a monkey wrench, however. Regus offices can, indeed, be problematic. I recommend you read through the threads pulled up in a Google And Your Business Forum search for the term 'regus' and you'll quickly see what I mean:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/regus

Here's a good example of what I'm referencing:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/regus/business/4WCI624GamE/xQtCLQw4HSMJ

And here's a good discussion of Regus offices, including the comments of a Google And Your Business Forum TC and a Google MapMaker RER:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local/1810-using-toll-free-main-any-chance-rank-2.html

I'd look into this further before going down this road. Hope this helps!

Hi Couponguy,

Smart question. You're right to be concerned here. Swapping out a geo term across near-identical pages is not going to be enough to differentiate your pages. You could, indeed, be at risk for a duplicate content penalty. I highly recommend that you write unique content for each page. My rule in this scenario is: if you can't find something unique to write on a local landing page, don't create the page. There are instances in which a company is covering just too many cities to create unique pages for all of them, in which case, they might be better served by creating an interactive map of some kind to show their service areas to their clients and then utilizing PPC, instead of of SEO, to gain visibility for all of these cities. Hopefully, though, you can find a creative approach for creating unique content for your pages. This is ideal, when it is possible.

Hi There!

Unfortunately, as both Ben and Pau are mentioning, this absurd practice is still hanging around the web. While it's very unlikely the stuffed footer is actually helping this competitor to achieve high rankings, it is aggravating to think it isn't preventing them, either.

Your post doesn't mention whether this is actually a business model with physical local offices or is fully virtual, but what I have seen in cases like these is that big brands tend to get away with a great deal of stuff I would never recommend to a smaller brand. It begs the question: how can we explain this phenomenon?

In the past, I've seen folks asserting that Google is soft on big brands. There could be some truth in this, but we've all seen Google take a massive whack at big brand practices with various updates, so that really makes this an unsatisfying assertion.

Another guess is that big brands have built enough supporting authority to make them appear immune to the consequences of bad practices. In other words, they've achieved a level of power in the SERPs (via thousands of links, mentions, reviews, reams of content, etc.) that enables them to overcome minor penalties from bad practices. This could be closer to the truth, but again, isn't fully satisfactory.

And, finally, there's the concept of Google being somewhat asleep at the wheel when it comes to enforcing guidelines and standards, and whether or not that's kind of excusable given the size of the Internet. They can't catch everything. I can see this in this light, but at the same time, don't consider Google to have taken a proactive stance on accepting public reporting of bad practices. Rather, they take the approach of releasing periodic updates which are supposed to algorithmically detect foul play and penalize or filter it. Google is very tied to the ideas of big data and machine intelligence. So far, it's been an interesting journey with Google on this, but it is what has lead to cases exactly like the one you're seeing - with something egregiously unhelpful to human users being allowed to sit apparently unpunished on a website that outranks you, even when you are trying to play a fairer game by the rules.

In cases like this, your only real option is to hang onto the hope that your competitor will be the subject of an update, at some point in the future, that will lessen the rewards they are receiving in the face of bad practices. Until then, it's heads down, working hard on what you can do, with a rigorous focus on what you can control.

Hi Alexander,

Good question and good discussion going on here. I am going to recommend against having two websites, as it sounds like you are operating a local business with a physical location.

What is the purpose of you having two websites? How do you feel this helps your customers?

I believe you are right to be concerned, and here is why:

When Google crawls the web to bring data into the 'cluster' they have about your local business, what they are 'hoping' to find is a clear business name, clear address, local phone number and authoritative website consistently associated with your business. In your case, what Google is finding is that two websites are associated with your business name and address. What are they to trust in this situation? By the same token, which website are your customers meant to trust?

Having multiple websites for a single business often represents risk for:

• Citation inconsistencies

• Ranking problems

• Merged listings

• Duplicate listings, including hidden duplicates

• Duplicate content

• Customer confusion

• Bot confusion

I don't know all of the nuances of your unique situation, Alexander, but chances are, if a client came to me with this scenario, I would be recommending that he pick a single authoritative domain and redirect the second domain to it, then work on building his authoritative domain into a powerful asset. Splitting up your authority over multiple domains just seldom makes sense, and there are definite risks involved. Hope this helps.

Hello there!

The best article that's been written about this topic is here: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2018/10/03/local-mobile-image-thumbnail-serps-its-all-about-context/

Hope this is just what the doctor ordered

Hey Luke!

Good conversation going on here. I'm going to respectfully disagree with the advice of adding a fictitious suite element to the address, as using your real-world address only is one of the guidelines about which Google is very clear. Using suite addresses in this scenario has, indeed, been something people have experimented with in the past, prompted by Google's past fiasco with large numbers of listings merging due to shared partial details. However, Google seems to have gotten much better at not merging listings, and, in fact, seems quite capable of discerning one business from another despite a shared address. However, I will make these provisos:

1. Luke, I want to be sure I understand what you're saying about only the phone number being different? Aren't the names of the 2 businesses different? If not, and this is actually just one business, then they are only eligible for a single GMB listing - not two of them.

2. Yes, the phone numbers must be unique.

3. There can be trouble if the two businesses are in the same industry. In other words, if one business is Bill's Garage and the other business is Frank's Garage, you'll want to regularly monitor for any signs of merging.

4. It's a good idea not to share Google categories between the two businesses, if it can be helped.

5. Always make sure (as the Local SEO) that you really are marketing two separate businesses that adhere to Google's definition of that. For example, you may encounter clients who want to market their air conditioning repairs as a separate business from their heater repairs, when in fact this is actually just a single business. You'll do more harm than good by helping the client try to market themselves as though they were two. Point to the guidelines and explain the disaster that can come from getting on Google's bad side and you'll be doing the client a world of good

Hope this helps!

Hi Carl,

You are not alone in wondering about this phenomenon in which a local listing appears to make organic visibility disappear. We've had several questions come into Q&A about this recently. In fact, what is happening is that the organic listing has typically been absorbed into the local blended listing which contains both first party data (like, from the company's website) + 3rd party data from Google's local index and other sources.

If clients are concerned, it will be helpful to educate them about this and, also, to show them heatmap/eyetracking studies like this one that shows how local listings get the lion's share of eyes on them in the SERPs:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eyetracking-google-serps

Many such studies have reached similar conclusions. Because of this, a high local blended rank is generally to be prized.

In the past, it was common for dominant businesses to have both a local listings and an organic one on the same page of the SERPs. I saw this everywhere, all the time. Now, I am hard put to come up with a single example of the results being configured in this way. Now, pretty much all local results are blended results and the appropriate goal for most local businesses is to get a high blended local listing for their main search phrases.

Regarding deleting the local presence from Google's index, it's really important to realize that this can be really tough to do - some would say impossible. Remember, Google can create a local page for any business at any time from third party data, hence, all the unclaimed listings that have always existed in their local index because they were created from third party sources and not from the say-so of the business owner. So, unless the client were to remove every reference to his local business from his website and across the entire web, there is always the chance that Google will re-create a profile for the business without his permission.

Because of this factor, and because of the vast power Google now has over the local business scene, business owners have had to determine to learn to play the 'game' with Google as well as they can. In most cases, the highest goal being aimed for is a high-ranking blended listing, which it sounds like your client has achieved. So, typically, this would be a time for congratulations rather than concern.

Hope these thoughts are helpful to you!

Hello Ferguson!

I agree with Chas on this that it's a little harder to answer without knowing the exact content. Most typically, I write URLs for city landing pages something like this:

whatever.com/city-state-service

For example, let's say the business is a mobile notary public in Berkeley, California. The URL might look like:

joenotary.com/berkeley-ca-mobile-notary

This would be for a business, and the landing pages might be for the different cities in which the business serves. Your situation is a little more complex with a single business with multiple locations in the same city and zip. Is your site a directory website? Or are you simply dealing with a single franchise's website? Perhaps you can give us a little more information.

At any rate, it sounds to me as if the only distinct items about the businesses would be their street addresses. How long are they? Would using them make them hugely long? What I'm describing would be something like this:

directory.com/joe-notary-123-centre-st

directory.com/joe-notary-39-brown-ave

a longer version would be:

directory.com/joe-notary-123-centre-st-boston-ma

It's not horribly long...but some businesses have really long street addresses with suite numbers and the like, so you'll have to judge whether an approach like this would start to look spammy.

Would this work for you? Has your question been answered? If not, please feel free to provide further details.

Miriam