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?

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]).

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?

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.

Glad to help

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 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?

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.

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.