Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Erin, Thank you for taking the time to answer.  This helps us to proceed.

Hi Ocelot, If the review you mention, above, is new, it could show up eventually. If not, it may have been filtered out. I believe Google is stepping up review filtering, in which case it will not show up because it has been filtered. I'm going to excerpt some data here for you from Mike Blumenthal's Q&A roundup about review changes relating to Google+ Local. Here is the full post: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/05/31/google-local-qs-and-some-as/ If a user just has a gmail account will they be able to write a review or must they also sign up for Google+? They will need to sign up for Google + So our customers are not able to leave reviews unless they are on Google+? Yep, you need a Google+ account to write a review. See the help page. Can reviewers leave anonymous reviews? No. At this point it is real names only. Is there any way to choose a nickname like we had in Places reviews? No Why am I not seeing the “Leave a Review” button? These had been removed from the Places page in anticipation of this move and put on the new Google+Local page. If you are still not seeing the review button it is because you have landed on the old Place page which is still accesible. **Why would Google make my re-publish old reviews while I’m trying to publish a NEW review for a different business? ** Why it happens at that point in the process was an intentional design decision. It is a one time process needed since Google is moving from anonymous and nicknamed reviews to full, real identity reviews . This necessitated some sort of user approval process to explicitly allow your user name to be seen or to choose to make the review private. Oh Google, you are driving me CRAZY! Can you please tell me how a dentist can have a Zagat review rating on their places page? In this case it will be a single number indicating quality on the 0-30 scale. Best practices are roughly the same, but an increase in social engagement is definitely the direction things are going. I highly recommend that you read Mike Blumenthal's post on adjusting to the changes: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/0/08/google-for-business-places-forums-wrapup/

Hi Kevin, Actually, you can see all of the categories if you click on them. Lots of changes, huh? Miriam

Thanks Mike - Ill review everything again. Close it up.

That's just bad usability and bad practice. Me as a user wouldn't want to click on your image and be lead to the image itself, or back to the article. Would you?

EGOL, really appreciate your insight. We certainly have searches that we do real well in, with the top 2/3/4 places claimed (and more spots on P2, P3 etc), but this is certainly one of the most extreme cases I've seen!

Hi Kandice, What, precisely, do you mean by, "Google Counts their WeddingWire reviews". The only reviews Google should be displaying are, as Ian has mentioned, your Google-based reviews, plus the new Zagat 30 point rating system. Can you provide a screenshot or clearer explanation of what you are seeing? Thanks!

I use UBL for creating citations. It submits your Local Listing information to over 200 Buisness Listing sites like Yelp, and others. I don't use it primarily for link building purposes, as I don't know much about how quality the sites are or if they're even followed/no-followed links, some may not even have links, etc. They're primarily for the Citations to improve Local. So I pretty much forget about links when I do that. And based on what I'm hearing from the Google Penguin update, Directories may not be that great of a place to build links currently either. Or at least there is a little more of a vetting process that link builders need to go through right now before selecting a directory to submit to.

All local listings for Yahoo! UK are managed and maintained via a 3rd party company called Infoserve. You're lucky if you don't get spammed from them every week telling you to list a free business with them. Learn how to add your business, clicking the link from this page will allow you to create a business listing.

Hi Bilal A good thing is to add Google seller ratings as this will help improve click thru rates Google has an article on this  http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=190657 Basically, unless your sites/products are getting reviews on sites such as price grabber, realtime etc the only easy way to achieve this is google checkout. There is a good blog on Moz, its a couple of years old but still relevant and well worth a read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-rank-well-in-google-products-search-a-big-list-of-places-to-get-reviews  Hope this helps and good luck

Cool, cheers Kyle. If you wanted to PM me with a link to their YT channel i can let you know where i think the content will perform best.

And one of the chief difficulties between the local business crowd and Google arises, I believe, from Google's founding mindset of secretiveness. While understandably essential to protecting their mystery algo, it's quite another matter to publish such critical data about real local businesses while keep one hand behind one's back. I don't believe I've ever had a local business owner tell me, "I love Google." They know Google is important, but they don't love them.

Thanks Alan, great answer

Haha - I didn't notice that, actually. Here are a couple more links, too, David, that might be good to look at: http://searchengineland.com/mediative-eye-tracking-google-maps-study-100783 http://results.mediative.ca/Mediative_White-Paper-Google-Places-on-the-iPhone.html So glad the first one was helpful.

Hi Eric, Keri has a really good point. I'm looking at this page in particular: http://www.curadebt.com/settlements/letter7.asp#.T7yRpL89bvg ... These pages seem to be literally unending, filled with 100s of links that all look the same except for the last few inches at the bottom. Additionally, you have a page here for El Paso http://www.curadebt.com/debt/debt-free-debt-help-el-paso.asp#.T7ySd789bvg ...which is almost identical to this one for Huntington Beach... http://www.curadebt.com/debt/debt-free-debt-help-huntington-beach.asp#.T7ySeb89bvg If you ran these pages through the SEOmoz PRO Web App, they would be flagged as duplicate content. I'm not saying this to be harsh, but Google is undoubtedly penalizing you for pages like this. So here's my advice. Set up an SEOMoz PRO campaign. If you can't afford it, sign up for the free trial. Run your first campaign on your website and fix all the major errors that you find. Read this article by Dr. Pete - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world As for link building, follow the advice of John and Keri above Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Arthur, It sounds as though "Option A" is being generated by an already-existing Yellow Pages listing with incorrect information? If so, I think you should deal with the Yellow Pages issues first. You should also track down all the other data sources that might be providing incorrect information to Google. I highly recommend David Mihm's "Local Search Ecosystem" which you can find here: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/local-search-ecosystem-2012/ Here's the thing, though. They're not true duplicate listings if they have different addresses. You may have some issues getting them merged until you can update the data. So, once you've dealt with the upstream data providers, I'd go ahead and modify the incorrect listing without claiming it, making it match the correct listing perfectly. Once you've done that, you should have more luck with the merging process. My opinion is that claiming both listings is **not **the way to go. Having two listings for the same location in your account is in violation of the Google guidelines, and I see no advantage to it. Instead, you should follow this process order to merge duplicate listings: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183009 As for which listing to chose as the primary - that's a tough one. Did you say that Option B is already ranked #1? If so, I'd probably go with that one, but only once everything else has been fixed. In summary: Correct the upstream data providers that are causing the problem. Try to track them all down Modify the incorrect listing so it is identical to the correct one Claim one of them - I'm thinking the one that's ranked #1, but someone else may disagree DON'T claim the second one. Instead, follow the Google guidelines to report a duplicate listing.

Good quality content is always important no matter what you are targeting when it comes to SEO. Remember - great content + exposure = links More links leads to an increase in search engine ranking, but remember when link building always go for quality over quantity (don't lose site of this and go for any spammy low quality link). Links essentially show search engines that people place value on that website or webpage as an information source for browsers, this applies to and is important for any type of business when it comes to search engine ranking. The more decent quality links you have the more weight your site has in the eyes of the search engines! Max has put forward some good suggestions in relation to a blog and what value can be gained from it for your friend's site. Remember decent content helps to add value to a website enriching the experience for visitors so I would get working on some if I were you. This link to a previous Q&A has some more suggestions relating to link building that you may want to utilize: http://www.seomoz.org/q/drowning-in-a-sea-of-link-building-advice

As answered in the other thread... Here's what came back from Channel Advisor. They know about as much as anyone when it comes to Amazon and Ebay stores so I think this is about as good as we're going to get. I hope it helps! Hi Everett--So we don't have any definite answer, but the consensus is that the name doesn't matter.  We've put out feelers to eBay and Amazon and will let you know what we find out. **Person A:**My initial gut response is if they change their name on Amazon it should pass through to Google as is, but I don't know where Amazon is getting the name of the seller for their GPS feed.  I'd have to investigate but again my gut says it is part of the name they pull from the listing itself which comes from the name the seller created.I'll see if I can get any more info from Amazon before we reply.  I'd imagine the others operate the same way.Person A, email 2: Okay, I haven't gotten any answers from Amazon or eBay but I've done some random google searches myself and I cannot find a single ad from one of those sites that references the name of a seller.  The Amazon listing is the information from the product detail page with an amazon.com link, which when you click takes you to the direct page (with many sellers) on the page.  The eBay ones sometimes have listings but I am not finding any names anywhere.  I'm happy to keep investigating but am inclined to say this is a non-issue. **Person B: ** I don't know the answer.  I would be pretty surprised if (marketplace X individual seller X product listing duration) is more than a small component of the GPS algorithm though I don't know.  The effect would decrease over time also.  It wouldn't factor into my decision for rebranding my site. Best,Delisa