Hi John!

Good questions. I'll answer it in 3 parts for the sake of organization:

1. No - Google does not penalize anyone for hiding their address. If the business does not receive customers at a staffed location during stated hours of operation, then not hiding the address is a violation of Google's guidelines (see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en) and this violation is what could lead to possible action on Google's part. So, don't think of hiding the address as something that will incur a penalty.

2. That being said, there is a school of thought in the Local SEO world that in a scenario of uneven competition, businesses with a staffed, physical office that welcomes customers during stated business hours may have a slight advantage over competitors who do not have these amenities and are therefore hiding their address in compliance with Google's guidelines. So, the nuance to understand here is that if in the 7 or 3 packs in your client's industry/geography, some competitors can show their address while others have to hide it, the former may have some advantage. No one knows the exact degree of this hypothetical advantage, but it may exist. On the other hand, if in your client's packs, all of their competitors are in the same boat and are having to hide their addresses, the playing field is completely even so no one has any hypothetical advantage. It just depends on what the field of competition is like in your client's packs.

3. To my knowledge, Google is the only major engine with this hidden address requirement. For any other local business platform, the choice to display or hide the address is a personal one. Your clients can be broken down into two categories, when it comes to this:

a- Client has privacy concerns and doesn't want their street address displayed anywhere. In this case, the Local SEO on the project will need to stick to building citations only on those platforms that support hidden addresses.

b- Client has no privacy concerns and doesn't care if their street address is displayed in various places. In this case, there are no restrictions on where you can build citations.

Obviously, client B is at an advantage, because he will be able to create citations in more places.

Hope this breakdown helps clarify your options.

Hi Max,

For a tool like Moz OSE, it's a matter of depth that is likely preventing us from crawling through directories' millions of pages to find just one link on your particular listing on such a site. This does not meant that the links in your citations do not count as links - just that a crawl may not find them. Also, important to mention that the key point of building citations is not links - it's about ensuring that your business NAP is available and consistent on a variety of platforms. This makes you accessible to your customers and also strengthens search engines' 'belief' in the validity of your data.

Hi Steven,

There is no ideal length. Different platforms have different minimum and maximum requirements, and if you're using Yext, I would expect they have that, too. In Moz Local, we have a 250 character minimum, which is pretty average. In manual citation building, it's long been considered a best practice to write a number of descriptions of varying lengths for use on various platforms, but with the advent of automated citation building tools, you typically would just write one. So, I'd say 250 minimum, but definitely write more if there's more to say. Be concise, but take the time to highlight the key points you feel will influence customers (or the congregation, in your case!) most. Hope this helps!

Hi Mark!

Thanks for asking this good question. While there is no limit to how big a website can be, I think you can see from the general response here that most members would encourage you to stick to manually developing quality pages rather than automating hundreds of thousands of pages, solely for ranking purposes. I second this advice.

Now, I would like to clarify your business model. Are you a physical, actual business that customers come to, either to buy paintball equipment or to play paintball in a gallery? Or, is your business virtual, with no in person transactions? I'm not quite understanding this from your description.

If the former, I would certainly encourage you to develop a very strong, unique page for each of your physical locations. If you have 10 locations (with unique street addresses and phone numbers), then that would be 10 pages. If you've got 20 locations, that would be 20 pages, etc. But don't approach these with a 'just switch out the city name in the title tags' mindset. Make these pages as exceptional as possible. Tell stories, show off testimonials, share pictures and  videos, entertain, educate, inspire. These city landing pages will be intimately linked into your whole Local SEM campaign, provided they each represent a business location with a unique dedicated street address and unique local area code phone number.

But, if you are considering simply building a page for every city in the UK, I just can't see justification for doing so. Ask yourself - what is the value?

There are business models (such as carpet cleaners, chimney sweeps, general contractors, etc.) that go to their clients' locations to serve and for which I would be advising that they create city landing pages for each of their service cities, but this would be extremely regional...not statewide or national or International. A carpet cleaner might serve 15 different towns and cities in his region, and I would encourage him to start gathering project notes and testimonials, videos and photos to begin developing a body of content important enough for him to start creating strong, interesting and unique pages for each of these cities. But I've also had local business owners tell me they want to cover every city in California, for instance, because they think it will help them to do so, and I discourage this.

Even if the business is virtual and doesn't have any in-person transactions with clients or physical locations, I would still discourage this blanketing-the-whole-nation-with-pages approach. A national retailer needs to build up its brand so that it becomes known and visible organically for its products rather than your theoretical approach of targeting every city in the nation. In short order, the mindset behind that approach just doesn't make good horse sense.

And, as others have stated, adding thousands of thin, potentially duplicate pages to any site could definitely have a very negative effect on rankings.

My advice is to make the time to start developing a content strategy for cities in which you have a legitimate presence. If budget means you can't hire a copywriter to help you with this and to speed up the work, accept that this project deserves all the time you can give it and that a slow development of exceptional pages is better than a fast automation of poor quality pages.

Hope this helps!

Hi Greenhornet77,

Good question. Schema and hCard both work. I used hCard for several years on all my local clients' sites, but I've transitioned now to Schema because of the agreement between all search engines that it's readable by them. If Schema is new to you, check out this generator:

http://schema-creator.org/

For local businesses, be sure you start by clicking the 'organization' tab in the left nav. You have a choice of course, and to date, hCard still appears to be working fine, but a lot of SEOs were ticked when Google stopped supporting geoSitemaps (see: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/28/google-still-supporting-kml-files-but-not-the-use-of-geo-sitemaps/), and perhaps they may be less inclined in future to abandon schema because it's supported by multiple engines. Just a thought.

Hey Rod,

While there hasn't really been any more news that I'm aware of on this, you might like to check out the thread on Linda Buquet's forum, which has some additional discussion and some other links in it, for further reading:

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/29401-google-warns-about-doorway-page-algo-update-could-affect-local.html

Hey There!

I totally get how this can be complex. While I think it's important to mention the areas which you virtually serve, what I, personally, don't find to be a good strategy is one in which any business that serves nationally tries to create a page for every city. The services they are offering across the country are the same, and the only reason to create a page for each city would be if the services are somehow different from city to city. This is different than a local business that has to describe their services in a small handful of cities to make it clear where they will travel to. For a virtual/national/international business, I don't know of a way to create unique content for hundreds, thousands or millions of cities and towns when the service is the same for all.

There needs to be another approach to clarifying countries served than a city-by-city approach. But, I wouldn't be the expert on this, because I work primarily in the Local SEO field. I could see, if you serve 3 different countries, having a unique page for each country explaining hours or operation, languages spoken, etc., ... but not every city. It doesn't seem scaleable or realistic to me to do this this way for a virtual business.

I'm going to ask for some additional input from our team from staff members with more experience in national/international SEO than I have. Please stand by, and thanks for asking a good question!