Hi Kevin,

Did this former tenant relocate elsewhere?

Hey Jeff!

Great topic. Let me number by responses for easier reading:

1. First of all, important to be clear here that regardless of how you think of the business location, their name on all their local business listings must simply be their real-world brand, as it appears on street signage. So, only Apexnetwork on all listings. Not Apexnetwork North Madronna, Apexnetwork South Madrona.

2. When franchises operate in cities where there are distinct, known districts (like San Francisco with North Beach, the Sunset District, Bernal Height, etc) this would be my favorite way to differentiate branches on the website, it terms of what I would put in the URL, the tags and the text. People actually search this way (pizza North Beach, pizza Sunset District). But, in other cases where the public doesn't strongly identify different neighborhoods of a city, I recommend following Taco Bell's lead and just going by street address. Here's a example: https://locations.tacobell.com/tx/dallas/3127-inwood-rd.html?utm_source=yext&utm_campaign=googlelistings&utm_medium=referral&utm_term=001331&utm_content=website

So, unless you have two franchise locations on the same street (unlikely), the above model can work. Just remember, this is for website use ... not for differentiating the names on the listings.

3. Finally, if you're needing to separate out a variety of locations for something like a spreadsheet, or Google My Business, or Moz Local, you can assign a store code to each of the locations.

Hope this helps!

Hi There!

We have two nice resources here on Moz that should help you feel totally clear on Hummingbird vs. Rankbrain:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-hummingbird

https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-rankbrain

Hope these help, but please let me know if you have any questions remaining after reading through those! I'm pretty sure I wrote both of them, so if anything isn't clear, just ask

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.

Just wanted to update this thread with a little note that I've created a blog post about this very topic, published this afternoon on the Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog/lost-anonymous-google-reviews

I totally understand, Laura. It's really dreadful to see your hard-earned reviews just disappear, at the stroke of a pen from Google!

Something I hope will help to think about ... it's consistently found by surveys that well over 1/2 of customers will leave reviews if asked. It's just finding the best way to ask that's the challenge. If your consumer segment is particularly tough, you might want to consider checking out software like GetFiveStars, that will help you systematize review acquisition.

Hi Pau,

Thanks for contributing to this thread.

I do want to offer a very serious warning against ever buying reviews. Doing so can lead to:

1. Legal action against the brand

2. Public humiliation and irreversible brand damage

3. Removal of local business listings

Purchasing reviews is an act that has the intention of deceiving the public. It's not an honest business practice, and any potential reward will never be worth the risk of lawsuits and loss of the public's trust.

The good news is, good businesses need never purchase reviews. Deliver a quality experience to customers, follow the guidelines of the various platforms as to how you can/can't ask for reviews, and you should be just fine.

Hi Laura,

I agree with you that there hasn't been a ton of buzz surrounding this. I'd put it down to the fact that when Google makes a decision like this, there's nothing you can really do about it. You can't get the reviews back. What a pain, I know. My suggestions:

1. Be sure you have an active review acquisition strategy in place so that you are continually earning reviews at a moderate pace.

2. Be sure you are earning reviews beyond Google on the other platforms your customers are most likely to use.

These are the best insurance policies I know of in an environment in which Google can make policy changes at the drop of a hat.

For sure, Kevin! Real estate is definitely one of those verticals (like hotels) that has long since been chiefly taken over in the SERPs by directories and rich features. Hard-to-impossible to outrank TripAdvisor if you're marketing a hotel, or Zillow if you're a realtor. Likely, you'll just have to make sure you're listed on the directories, go after the longer tail organically, and then rely on social, WOMM, etc. to bring in those leads.

Hi Kevin!

I'm so sorry, but I'm not aware of a preexisting study of this kind.

I see things like: https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/real-estate-seo/

But as to a study stating "It's gotten 10x harder to rank for 'house for sale' in San Francisco in the last two years" - no.

If you're in the real estate market, Kevin, are there any bloggers in that space you follow? Any targeted publications? Maybe they would have some statistics that would prove/disprove your theory that real estate SEO is harder than it used to be?

Localizing this makes it a bit more difficult, Kevin, as competition varies so widely by geography. There are 41,000 Chinese restaurants in the US (sounds ultra competitive), 400 in San Francisco (ouch! competitive) but only 1 in Valley Springs, CA (zero competition).

Sounds like a good plan, Ed!

Hey Ed,

I know just how you're feeling about this, and sometimes, you can be so deep in the weeds of a project, you can begin to feel a bit lost. I think this happens to everybody now and again.

Yes, remove that review schema from the homepage. It could possibly be a spam signal. Not 100% positive about that, but I think it may be so.

Another suggestion: I know that rankings are important. I get that. But I've had clients in the past who overemphasized this beyond what was reasonable, narrowing their focus so that they lost sight of the bottom line: conversions. Yes, you have to have visibility to earn conversions, but it could be that you need to turn down the dial on the rankings focus for a bit and see how well the current rankings you have are converting to appointment bookings, or some other valued metric. Could there be usability improvements made that could take the same amount of traffic you're getting right now and increase the phone calls it is yielding, or the time spent on the site, or the links your content is earning? Maybe focus on that for a bit, and then come back to the rankings picture.

Hiring an expert for some consulting might also be a bright idea, if you hire someone truly qualified. I'm thinking along the lines of a Joy Hawkins, here ... not just a run-of-the-mill Local SEO. A true expert will often notice things a brand is overlooking, and from what they notice, a picture emerges of what is and isn't possible for the business. That can be very valuable.

Wishing you best of luck!

Hey Ed,

I'm not sure if you realize this, but you're never supposed to use aggregate Schema review markup on your homepage. More on this: https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-use-aggregate-review-schema-to-get-stars-in-the-serps/

So, skip that goal of stars showing up from this in relation to the homepage.

I want to be sure I'm understanding your goal here. I believe you're saying that you homepage isn't ranking for your core term. It's only ranking for branded searches. And this is making you think you need to make a landing page for your core term. If you only have one location, that really wouldn't be a best practice. Rather, you have to figure out what WILL move the needle for you and this core term (if anything). Some things (like proximity or filters) will be a brick wall you can't easily pass through. Others (like building authority) are what you're going to typically run into as recommended strategy. There is something about your competitors that is holding you lower than that coveted #1 spot, Ed, and a competitive audit is going to be the best solution to find out what that something is.

I did a post here on the Moz blog about doing a competitive audit to analyze local rankings, but you're talking about organic rank, right? That would be a bit different, though related. Either way, you've got to find that secret something. It could be proximity, it could be links, it could be content, it could be spam!

Am I understanding your topic correctly?

Enjoyed that WP article, EGOL. I'd be pleased to see MQ make a comeback, but it would take an ingenious idea on their part.

Hi there!

Yes, your sense that MapQuest has decreased in importance is correct. They were a very early mapping product and enjoyed some years as an early adopter. I believe MQ is still pulling data from Infogroup, but basically, they handed over the keys to Yext and their help documentation is all about using Yext instead of using MapQuest. Kind of sad, honestly. There was a time before Google Maps was the be-all-end-all in mapping.