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At a bit of a loss on this one... If anyone has any ideas about what's going on or how to tackle this, I'm all ears.

One of my clients, an orthodontist, is appearing in the top three organic positions and in the local pack for almost all keywords we're targeting. However, for the keyword "orthodontist" without any location modifiers attached to it, we're appearing in the top three organic results but our Google listing is not appearing in the local pack.

The three listings appearing in the local pack are his next-door competitor, one practice that closed almost a year ago, and a practice in two towns over. He and his competitor are the only two orthodontists in this town, so they should theoretically be the two main listings that are being pulled in.

The listing for the closed practice is marked as closed on Google and has been reported to Google several times in the last few months. The listing has no website or reviews on it, although it does have an address and a phone number.

We have spent months doing aggressive, in-depth NAP/local listing cleanups. We have 24 Google reviews with an average rating of 4.6 stars, and we're organically gathering reviews every week. We went through a site redesign at the beginning of this year, so we now have a mobile responsive website.

We are appearing in the local pack for almost every other keyword that we have high organic rankings for, so we know it isn't necessarily an issue with our Google My Business listing.

Does anyone have any ideas of what's going on, or what we can do to get our listing to appear in the local pack for this keyword? The keyword "orthodontist" is the single most important keyword to this client and our strategy, so we're open to any and all suggestions or thoughts.

Additional research turned up this Matt Cutts video which addresses my question head on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjRGkc__FwQ

A site we're working on has hundreds of thousands of inventory pages that are generally "orphaned" pages. To reach them, you need to do a lot of faceting on the search results page. They appear in our XML sitemaps as well, but I'd still consider these orphan pages.

To assist with crawling and indexation, we'd like to create HTML sitemaps to link to these pages. Due to the nature (and categorization) of these products, this would mean we'll be creating thousands of individual HTML sitemap pages, which we're hesitant to put into the index.

Would the sitemaps still be effective if we add a noindex, follow meta tag? Does this indicate lower quality content in some way, or will it make no difference in how search engines will handle the links therein?

I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend.

Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there?

Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time?

Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.

I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend.

Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there?

Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time?

Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.

Additional research turned up this Matt Cutts video which addresses my question head on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjRGkc__FwQ