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Thanks, Joe. Appreciate you taking the time. All the testing from my team and the client show no signs of fire now too. So, mission accomplished. One takeaway here seems to be that Google actually pays attention to the Feedback tab.

Joe,

Do you have any insight into the claiming process? I see you're in Australia. I wonder if the process is the same worldwide. On an interesting note, I used the Feedback tab at the bottom of the insights panel to tell Google that the picture of the burning building was not a fair representation of the city. It's been there for a year or more in all its smoky glory. Today when I Googled "City of Lakewood WA" and "Lakewood WA", I saw the same knowledge panel but no hellish hotel fire picture! So maybe the problem is solved. Do you mind checking to see if you have the same experience (i.e. no fire picture)? I'm not sure if Google notes a preference of mine and changes everyone's experience or just mine.

I'm working with the City of Lakewood, WA, on an image campaign that overlaps a bit with some SEO goals. If you Google "Lakewood, WA", in the knowledge panel to the right of the search results is an image of building on fire. I'm not sure where this image comes from or why it has been selected as the image to represent the City of Lakewood but its been there for a while. If this was a small business, I would simply claim their Google My Business page and feed some good images into it. Problem solved. But Google doesn't offer an option to "Claim this City". LOL. Can you create a GMB page for a municipality? Does anyone know the right thing to do here to make this picture go away and give the city more control over its own image?

It depends.

I have a few questions.

1. Are these links all coming from different domains (e.g. carparts.com/ppc-page, waterbottles.biz/landing-page)?
2. Are all these links pointing to the same page on your site?
3. Do these pages link to each other? (i.e. waterbottles.biz links to all your other PPC pages and all your other PPC pages link to it).

If the links are coming from different domains, not linking to each other, and linking to different pages on your website, that all looks pretty natural and non-link farmy to me.

The question for me, would be what value do these links to your site deliver? Are they distracting the user from the main call to action? Are you hoping that these links will tell users you provide PPC services? Just curious.

Miriam,

Does this mean that multiple businesses operating out of a building with the same address won't be viewed as duplicates?

Camarin,

I'm eagerly awaiting the answer to your question as a I have a very similar one. Keep up the great work.

Best,

Paul

Indeed. Luckily organic is the client's top traffic and conversion source.

Thanks for answering my question, Miriam. It looks like the client's type of business wouldn't work with GMB's rules. Thanks for making me aware of this. As to your business model question, each community has it's own brand name (e.g. Golden Homes by [Builder Name]).

Regarding your functionality question, I like that it's drag and drop, easy to add widgets, and allows me to visualize SEM and SEO data in one, central place.

I have a number of builders of new homes as clients. Typically, they build out a whole neighborhood at once and give the neighborhood a fancy name. We were planning to create Google My Business pages for these communities but then ran into some potential challenges.

1. As new communities, they are sometimes not on Google's radar yet
2. Some of them have model homes where you might take a tour with a realtor that serves the community exclusively but many don't.

So here come the questions...

1. Is there a way to make Google speed up its process of recognizing new addresses?
2. I have to choose an address to associate with the GMB page, probably the address of model home. Is this going to create annoying problems for a buyer who someday buys that model home?
3. Since some communities don't have a model home, I could arbitrarily assign an address of one of the neighborhood homes to the GMB page, but this leads to the same question about creating a GMB page that will exist after the builder has sold all the houses in the community. Will it be weird to have the GMB referring to someone's private residence down the road?
4. My assumption is that claiming a GMB page would help with local ranking if someone searches for something like "new homes" in addition to providing easy driving directions to someone who has done a bit of research and Googles the name of the new home community while out driving and searching for homes. These seem to be the main benefits, but are the challenges associated with questions 1-3 even worth the trouble of trying to claim listings for these communities?

I think Roman's response is thorough and well reasoned. I'm a content strategist (not a designer or developer), so I like the way his answer puts the user front and center. Bottom line: do in-text links and bread crumb links both help users? Yes, depending where you are on the page and how deep the page is. My instinct on bread crumbs is that their especially helpful once you get a couple pages deep in a site and a user might start to get a bit disoriented. My in-text links are often more driven by the content itself, what will provide added value to the user (or potentially SEO value to another page on the site). Hope that's helpful.

I'm working with the City of Lakewood, WA, on an image campaign that overlaps a bit with some SEO goals. If you Google "Lakewood, WA", in the knowledge panel to the right of the search results is an image of building on fire. I'm not sure where this image comes from or why it has been selected as the image to represent the City of Lakewood but its been there for a while. If this was a small business, I would simply claim their Google My Business page and feed some good images into it. Problem solved. But Google doesn't offer an option to "Claim this City". LOL. Can you create a GMB page for a municipality? Does anyone know the right thing to do here to make this picture go away and give the city more control over its own image?

Hello again, Lure Creative. Thanks for answering yet another of my questions. I would really like Moz to weigh in on this though. How about you? : )

Typically, you only want robots.txt to block access points that would allow hackers into your site like an admin page (e.g. www.examplesite.com/admin/). You definitely don't want it blocking your whole site. A developer or webmaster would be better at speaking to the specifics, but that's the quick, high-level answer.

After spending some time getting our NAPW info corrected on many of our key listings and claiming and configuring a few more, we recently added an SSL certificate to our domain. We've made the https version of our site the canonical version, set redirects, etc. Do we need to redo our citations with https to get our full SEO bang for buck out of our citations?

David's solution seems to be working for me. See his answer below. Hope it helps you too.

Paul,

Let me just say thank you for a thoroughly informed and thoughtfully written response. It gives me everything I need to guide my client. Really appreciate you taking the time.

I have a client who is asking for SEO help after renaming their business, getting a new URL, and somehow having an address change (without moving to a new location...weird...I know). This has set them back big time in terms of their domain authority (they went from a 46 to a 15 in DA). The web developers they work with put a 302 redirect in place from their old URL (home page), which had 10,477 links from 52 root domains, to their new URL's home page. Open site explorer shows that they now have 5 links!

We can improve some of the local search set backs from the name and address change with a citation audit and clean up, but the domain name change is a killer. So here's my question or questions, really: Do we need to manually rebuild links with partner websites? I know there is debate around the actual link juice passed along from a 302 vs a 301 redirect (despite what has been publicly stated by Google). Or is this just a waiting game while old links get recrawled?

Yes, the URLs on our current citations are going through redirects to the https version of our address. I am a Moz Local customer and I just made the change to the https version of our URL in our account settings. Thanks for the feedback, Miriam.

Done and done, Miriam. Already updated Google+, Facebook, Yelp and YP. Thanks again for the clarity.