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A client's business just recently changed addresses.  Even though they are physically less than a mile from the previous location, the city has changed.  This has resulted in our Google Places results dissappearing (no surprise).  What is the best practice for people searching for <product><metroplex-primary-city>to still get our Google Places result, even though we are technically in a suburb of this metroplex?</metroplex-primary-city></product>

Already added the primary city name to the description.  What else can I do?

Thanks for the response! Will check out.

Thanks eunaneunan!

I am in the process of setting up a shopping cart for a customer.  We will probably use osCommerce.  Are there established best practices and guidelines to make one's cart trigger results in the Google "Shopping" category?  For instance, using microdata and the semantic markup from Schema.org?  Any experience here is welcome.

By the way Adam, one thing that tripped me up, and evidently lots of other SEOMozers, is that it will report duplicate content and duplicate titles if your links of the form http://domain.com/xyz.html are not 301 redirecting to http://www.domain.com/xyz.html.

Brian,

The system regards foo.com/bar.html as a duplicate of www.foo.com/bar.html.

Use a 301 redirect to fix that problem.  I do not yet know if seomoz will take rel canonicals into account like the SEs do.  Maybe someone else can answer that.

Hi,

I am attempting to put together a set of procedures to undertake when optimizing Google Places pages.  Does anyone have a good list of metrics and methods for determining them in order to build profiles of competitors' Places pages?

Thanks

You might also want to try to Google speed plugin, http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/, it identify issues and will give fix suggestions that you can pass to your tech guys/gals.

Hi Ben,

How about getting reviews that google takes from insiderpages.com or yahoo local, for example, and having them show up at all?  Does google have the ability to choose which reviews it draws from these sites and to place on Google Places pages?

Hi Gabriel,

' Looks like an html entity code for some non-standard apostrophe.  Not sure why though, it looks normal. Your apostrophe might need to be changed to a single quote instead.

Page titles definitely can change rankings.  I have had mostly good experiences with optimizing my page titles for SEO, and a few bad ones, but nothing horrific.  How far did your rankings drop?

Hey Erik,

This is probably due to URLs of the form http://domain.com not being 301ed to http://www.domain.com.

Depending on how your site was created (e.g. dynamic, static, CMS), it maye be easier to place 301 redirects in your configuration (Assuming you are using Apache, but should be possible in any Web Server).  If that is not possible, and you are using a dynamic language for your site, like PHP, you can place 301 redirect code there.  Short of these things, you can do as the tool suggested, and create Canonical tags.

Hi Ben,

How about getting reviews that google takes from insiderpages.com or yahoo local, for example, and having them show up at all?  Does google have the ability to choose which reviews it draws from these sites and to place on Google Places pages?

I was wondering if this is needed?  Doesn't the specfication at schema.org cover this?  Or would Google use the Author itemscope different from rel="Author"?