Hi Geraldine

A client of ours used http://www.regus.fr/ to set up an address in Paris for this purpose and later opened a real office - and a real French company - when sales increased. Regus have offices worldwide see http://www.regus.fr/country-selector.aspx so I imagine that they can help for all countries.

I'll add to Gianluca's comments that Google won't be "fooled" by this address into recognising you as a French company. Google checks this through access to company registration databases rather than its own My Business listings.

But there are plenty of other advantages in having a My Business listing and Paris would be a good base in France for your site (audience reach). For an e-commerce site, potential clients will be reassured by a local telephone number too.

Looking at the French site, I noticed that the HREFLANG is incorrectly implemented. This is more important than the postal address. I strongly suggest you correct that

• Neil

Hi

A year after you asked the question may be too late but I run a French SEO consultancy company in France and we can help with a lot of projects. I'm also well connected in the French SEO community so if you need something very specific I'm sure I can point you in the right direction.

Contact me on neil@goodness.fr if you still need help

Regards

• Neil

I've been trying to help a local chapter of a non-profit organisation set up a Facebook page (for free!) but the idea has been refused at the national level. I think from a lack of understanding of what good Facebook can do for their communication because even the page created for the whole NPO is very low on fans and hardly ever updated.

I've got plenty of examples of NGOs doing well on Facebook.

But what I'd love to find an example of an NGOs doing good work on Facebook through local chapters and (in my dreams) get my hands on guideline document that explains to local chapters how they should go about creating the page in accordance with the NGOs.

Anyone out there have good examples ?

Thanks

• Neil

Thinking it through I think that your ScrantonAutoGlass.com and ClevelandRealEstate.com suggestions are bad advice. I appreciate your opinion though!

For a local business the disadvantages from this type of name outweigh  the one advantage you gain by having a better chance of ranking for popular search term. IMO.

This discussion has helped me think it through. Thanks all

• Neil

Hi

(What happened to the User Voice feedback in PRO campaign reports? Another cutback because of scalability?) I'm getting sent here for Help on the reports

It's Friday morning here in France ; I'm preparing a meeting with a client and as part of this I want their Rankings Report from the campaing I set up for them month's ago

Half the keywords are showing up as "SAT" ; the message at the top says "Your keywords are updated weekly on Saturday. The last update was January 26th, 2013"

They're not new keywords, if I click on them I get historic data up untill January 19th

I'm guessing you had a problem on January 26th but why not put January 19th rankings rather than SAT ?

The report is now useless.

Here's the url if useful

http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns/54444/rankings

• Neil

You're giving me a lot of examples of online businesses rather than what I imagine my Chamber of Commerce audience was: local businesses who have an existing highstreet identitiy

Hotels.com with the .com is a great brand for the online business that is behind it. Would hotel.com have been a good domain for a hotel in Paris ? I don't think so. But I don't think hotel-paris.com is a good domain either. It might have given you an advantage for this search term but it's crummy and cheap as an online identity.

The examples I'm seeing are like this

www.hotel-restauraunt-town-name.com

www.oil-industry-job-offers.com

Behind each site their is a business that has a business name

It's as if McDonald's had decided to go with www.hamburger-restaurants.com rather than www.mcdonalds.com

15 years down the line whould you suggest they change?

• Neil

Takeshi,

I'm assuming that this sort of anchor text has a negative effect since Penguin

SearchEngineLand.com is not an EMD in my opinion as I don't think that people were searching for a "land of search engines" before the site existed

SeoTools.net is a good example though and for me it's a poor domain name. If I search for "seotools" in Google (here in France) I get seobook, seomoz and a few French sites before I get seotools.net and then seotools.com

• Neil

Hi

I've never recommended exact match domain names as good SEO ; the problem being that they don't help you create brand identity and even when someone remembers your site's name (seo-question-answer-forum.com for example) they are going to type it into Google and they'll see competitors all around the link in the SERP - and you'll probably only have one link, no site links.

In a recent talk at a local Chamber of Commerce I drove this point home again with the new threat of penalties from Penguin (now and moving forward) and a reported EMD penalty that may or not be active in France.

So I've pretty much convinced everyone that EMD's are now toxic and if they are thinking of launching a new site they should avoid them.

But what if you have one already? I've had this question from people that were in the audience. Should they leave their domain now and set up a new site?

Not sure how I should answer!

The question comes from Chamber of Commerce audience and therefore people with bone fide businesses - so my gut feeling for the initial reasons above is "Yes" ; not using your company name as your main online identity was an error and you should correct it now. Create a new domain name and move to it via a simple 301 rewrite rule

But am I right? Or are there cases where this is bad advice

• Neil in France

Damion,

Thanks for the reply.

I do use advanced segments and it's also easy getting info from the All Traffic Sources report

But I do have some cases where one site can contain natural editorial links and paid banner ad links. Other cases where a page can have different types of links: on a banner or text link.

We're thinking about using analytics to distinguish these ; but I think that you're right, the main drag will be making sure that all links are actually updated correcly.

• Neil

Hi

I'm working on a real estate agents web site which has a lots of links coming from paid listings in real estate linstings sites (this in France so I'm not sure examples will mean anything but basically the agents have 900 house listings in each site and each listing has a backlink)

In analytics these are classified as referals and that's fine for the moment

But because sites provide different types of links, we are considering tagging all paid links with analytics utm codes. Mainly to learn which ads are actually providing qualified traffic (providing contacts).

I'm guessing that currently these links, there are thousands, bring seo value to my client's web site and are not considered as paid links.

Will adding the analytics codes to these links cause a loss of their value by clearly indicating to Google that we paid for them?

What's the current thinking on this? I'm tempted not to be worried about being honest about the origin of these links but I'm worried that there is a real danger of loosing current ranking

Any arguments FOR tagging paid links ?

Thanks for you help

• Neil

Thanks Andy

That was a great tip

• Neil

Thanks for the 2 replies to my question ; Wissam gave a selection of good links and although I'd visited them all before it got me into the right frame of mind for preparing my conf (late one night!)

The conference went well and the slides (in French) can be seen here : http://fr.calameo.com/read/000121207eff44339f40f

Just to give back something to the community here is a resumé in English of what I presented

Introduction showing classic Google Places (Google Adresses in France) at the top of in Google's results for a search for Hairdressers in the town of Urrugne (where the conference was held). Google Places gives the best visibility on this page

The same results as Google Places results

None of these results show a web site or a verfied owner

But there is a choice from 1 to 8 and an order which is important. Being number one is important

The Google Places page and a point on the detail in the data that Google has found: address, telephone number, geo-localisation, Street View and references in other sites

Google Places pages for hotels have added features: prices from booking.com, hotels.com and availability search

Back to hairdressers, the same results in Google Maps (link from the top of Google.fr rather than the link in the left hand column). Some confusion as to what the difference is beteween Places and Maps (the Maps logo is shown on the Places business page)

Why is Zen Cut hairdressers first?

Rather ask why another is only 14th. The screen shot shows that Google found a lot less information on this company.

(Turns out that this person is a freelance hairdresser without a salon in Urrugne)

How could this hairdresser get from 14^th to the top of the results? Understand why Google hasn't found more information about her on the web. Claim the Places page. Create a web site and link this into the Places page

All of these actions should be enough to claim first page in the results. One action may be enough to get in the top 8

I then explain how to claim a Google Place page. The verification process.

Now a more complicated case: Hotels in Biarritz. There are over 100 hotels in the town of Biarritz. Being first in Google means a lot of direct business for hotels who may otherwise depend on Booking.com or other commission based booking systems (there are ranking issues there too)

The results are presented differently in this cas. My take is that is that these are mainly organic results complemented by info from Places, after or instead of classic snippets. In general we're in SEO territory: a large dataset and the need for sorting results with the “best” first. Best being the most relevant to the person searching.

The results in Google Places are NOT the same as Google Maps

We're looking at Google Maps being an application for geo-localising data and Places being a database of business organisations (the yellow pages); Places data can be shown in Maps but there is some other algorithm in action here - possibly with more weight to geographic data but also possibly based on availability information specific to hotels. The Maps results seem to based on an arrival and departure date

How can you be #1 in a more competitive situation ?

1st solution and the easiest: PAY for it. The screen shot shows Adwords with a Google Places extension. Boost is not available in France yet. Not many businesses are using the Adwords option

Now a question on SEO statergy. It's the first time I've addressed the issue in a conference to business owners. Once you know a lot about how Google can select and the order results (this bit to follow), what do you do with the info? White Hat or Black Hat. I'm strictly White Hat but you see a lot of good results from ignoring Google Places' quality guidelines so I can understand that people are tempted to cheat. A lot of people “cheat” un-intentionally

Judgement day is coming though We're seeing a lot of activity from Google's quality team at the moment, so I think that Google France are beginning to take Places a bit more seriously. During my research I came across companies with listings refused or removed. One company with 93 Places listings for his 1 company for example!

A lot of what follows is from the Places Guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528&rd=1 and official Google blog posts that have recently been translated to French

The first easy thing is to do is complete your Places page as much as possible

Be CAREFUL to respect the guidelines; Google says that companies that don't could be suspended from Places

I then show a hotel, in total disrespect of these guidelines, getting a good ranking for an important search by putting keywords in his company name. But my advice is still to correct his business name to respect the guidelines. He may be happy with this exploit now, but he will be less happy if he disappears from Google completely. Don't take the risk.

There is also another example of a hotel using all uppercase letters in his company name ranking well. Again this is against guidelines and should be corrected. We are possibly not facing a suspension for this but it is not impossible that it could affect some quality rating.

In the detail of other Google guidelines, I'm also recommending companies to select just one category in Google's list and then add their own categories if they think it is relevant ; Use service areas rather than creating false listing for nearby towns. Feedback from the audience on company actually doing this successfully though: company with one real address listed in most French towns at the same street address.

Use custom attributes to add links to your web site and keywords. If you're a hotel or restaurant, follow the examples that Google has given. These links are not direct as redirections are added.

You can also add news to your page. These posts can contain links and these are neither nofollow nor through redirections

black hats rush out of the room

Leaving the Places page, understand where Google is getting your data from, what trusted sources could there be in France? I’ve no fixed idea but Axciom exists here; Google originally got its data from Infobel. Official resources exist and these are more or less up to date.

Google is also matching address information in general business web directories and from your own site. Be sure to always use the same address in all your listing. Forgetting your address on your own site is a common mistake.

User reviews are part of the equation. Google has its own reviews (HotPot) and also gets info from other sources. Some are taken with the sources permission, others not. Use the service the review comes from to complain about a review

Reply to review where you can. Create accounts with the sites that give you reviews and give reviews to your competitors.

Is it a good idea to invent your own great reviews? Do you think that Google can spot that? Strange that some users only ever leave one review on the web, ever ... a brilliant one for your business. All using the same IP address. Hmm.

Google Hotpot was launched in January ... No one in the room had ever seen it before

Other review sites can be found by looking at other sites in the same sector. Examples of Hotels and Restaurants. Some reviews are machine-translated from international sites. The quality is questionable. Cases of organisations being attributed reviews from other companies.

Do reviews have to be positive? Here I translated some results from http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml ; general opinion is that no, but a 4 or 5 star listing will look better in the results and will attract more clicks ; improved CTR can improve ranking - possibly

Looking forward, France can expect Boost and Tags to be available soon

Google Real Estate exists in the UK but this is a separate data base

More Google developments on the travel business are expected. The new reservation feature is possibly one step in this; reaction from the room that it only forces hotels to pass through booking.com. Hotels can no longer be independent.

I ended with copy of the Web Equity wheel from http://www.blumenthals.com/index.php?web-equity-infographic which shows that Places is just one of the things that you should be doing to make your local business visible online

Hope that is useful for people on here

Hi

I'm preparing a confernce in France to explain Google Places & Maps to an audience interested in promoting local businesses but mainly hotels and other tourism related.

As you know, searches such as Hotel + City are giving a lot of visibility to Google Places results. Being in the top results is as important if not more important than organic ranking.

I'm going to be looking into the new presentation of Google Places results in the SERPs and maybe underlining a difference in results between Places and Maps which I've just recently spotted.

Can anyone recommend some good ressources online to explain the changes that came about with Google Places  and ranking factors I should be talking about ?

If you have a pet theory on what triggers the different presentation of Places results in the main SERPS or what factors make one local business rank better than another in Google Places then please discuss below too

Ah ! Almost forgot, any feedback on Google Boost use also interesting for us ; although it isn't in France yet

Thanks

• Neil

As an SEO you're obliged to say translate all the folder names.

If you want to optimize your site for search engines, it is strongly recommended to use keywords in the Urls of the pages you'd like to see in the SERPs ; Its not compulsory, though, and with non-competitive terms you may get good rankings without it. A lot of sites have urls like mysite.com/index.php?page=123 and still rank well

A German site has German keywords obviously and you should have these words in your Url if you want an optimized site

If you're saying that technical reasons you can't do this, you'll have to make extra efforts elsewhere

Make sure that you have a fully translated breadcrumbs and navigation menus ... but if you can do this you shouldn't really be that far off translating the urls

• Neil

Yes I was thinking that these would be a seperate signal rather than somenting passed through links. The PrintRank?

• Neoil

I'm better off asking the questions in English but I'm based in France and have colleagues and clients who won't get eough out of SeoMoz if they have to struggle through it in English.

Although multi-linguism in Europe is amazing, it's not universal. And people tend to loose a lot of time and comprehension by reading or listening in English

• Neil

Hmm, tu penses?

J'ai toujours trouvé les domaines avec un tiret plus facile à lire et plus évident pour les moteurs à déchiffrer ; surtout quand c'est une langue étrangère ; bcp de sites en France utilisent les tirets ; service-public.fr, www.france-allemagne.fr par exemple

Et j'ai toujours peur de créer une expression que je ne voulais pas en collant deux mots ensembke. L'exemple type étant le site web de Pen Island

• Neil

(can we ask questions in a language other than English?)

Pour le SEO est ce qu'il faut mieux un domain avec les tirets ou sans ?

Les américains aurait tendance a faire les domaines sans tirets 
Par exemple goodseoconsultants.com

Et bcp disent qu'utiliser les tirets fait "spammy" ; En France il y a plus tendance à mettre les tirets mais est ce qu'il y a une risque négatif pour le sites qui le font ?

Par contre il y a plus de chances que les moteurs et les humaines comprennes les mots avec ; good-seo-consultants.com

Qui a raison ?

• Neil

Hi

Interested in your views on this and any references to research on the subject

Using Google Books recently I have discovered multiple citations of a web site I produced years ago in a whole load of publication. Really quite touching to find these 10 years afterwards

I imagine that this must have a positive effect on search engine listings for this site. The site has really good listings still. Has any research or any announcement been made by Google about this.

Pushing this a bit further ; An advertising hoarding has a web site address http:// ... would Google StreetView pick this up and could it be used as a signal too ?

• Neil

PS No I don't sell adversing hoardings

Hang on !

I would definitely avoid "301 back to the root page for jobs" or even a category page.

Over time, you are going to be creating a massive index of empty pages linking to a home page; that looks too spammy to me. If you want to be honest : 404 these pages- the job offer no longer exists, the page no longer exists --- you can personalise your 404 page to send the user to a relevant page

Honesty doesn't always pay though! To leverage the SEO benefits from these pages I would consider archiving the job listing, keeping the same url and just adding a message indicating that the post has been filled (an image will do)

That way, you’re keeping lots of unique content on your site and over time creating a log of pages.

To make these archived job pages useful to the user and to the search engines, dynamically add links to fresher job offers in the same category, company and town.

-       Neil

PS Does this new SeoMoz feature now mean I'm now paying to give free advise ?