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I've set up an author profile for myself, but if I'm writing articles for clients, I don't necessarily want to do it in my own name. Is it possible to set up a Google author profile using a G+ business page? Obviously the idea is to try and gain the rich snippets that only recognised authors receive, but to do so in the name of my client.

Thanks for the reply Glenn. I really can't see why we would have been penalised as everything we do is above board, although it does seem as if that might be the case. I certainly think that the QDF point you make is a valid one, although it could have been around the time of the latest Panda update too, so perhaps that might have flagged up something.

I think our next step might be to recreate the pages from scratch on entirely new URLs and see if that has any effect. We will certainly try and poach some of our competitor's links too!

Hi there. We are an internet marketing agency and recently did a fair amount of working trying to optimise for a number of different locations. Although we are based in Preston (UK), we would like to attract clients from Manchester, Liverpool, etc.

We created landing pages for each of the locations that we wanted to target and each of the services - so we had an SEO Manchester page and a Web Design Manchester page for example. These were all written individually by a copywriter in order to avoid duplicate content. An example of one of the first of these pages is here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/places/seo-blackpool.php

We created a 'where we cover' page and used a clickable map rather than huge long list of text links, which we felt would be spammy, to link through to these pages. You can see this page here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/where-we-cover.php

Initially we gained a great deal of success from this method - with the above Blackpool page ranking #7 for "SEO Blackpool" within a week. However these results quickly disappeared and now we don't rank at all, though the pages remain in the index. I'm aware that we don't have many external links pointing to these pages, but this cannot explain why these pages don't rank at all, as some of the terms are relatively non-competitive.

A number of our competitors rank for almost all of these terms, despite their pages being exact duplicates with simply the city/town name being changed. Any ideas where we've gone wrong?

I've set up an author profile for myself, but if I'm writing articles for clients, I don't necessarily want to do it in my own name. Is it possible to set up a Google author profile using a G+ business page? Obviously the idea is to try and gain the rich snippets that only recognised authors receive, but to do so in the name of my client.