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Hi Jared, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your good question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to understand and answer your query. Here are my thoughts: Firstly, don't trust SEO companies who cold call you. That's just one for the ages Secondly, here are Google's complete written guidelines for categories: Categories: Provide at least one category from the suggestions provided in the form as you type. Aim for categories that are specific, but brief. Categories should say what your business is (e.g. Hospital), not on what it does (e.g. Vaccinations) or things it sells (e.g. Sony products or printer paper). This information can be added in your description or as custom attributes. Categories should not contain location-based information (for example, Dog Walker Los Angeles is not permitted). Only one category is permitted per entry field. Do not “stuff” entry fields with multiple categories. Thirdly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with picking categories that represent your practice areas on your Google Place Page, provided they meet the above guidelines of saying what your business IS instead of what it does. So, this means you are a DUI Lawyer...not just 'DUI'. This distinction is important, and I believe the categories you have given as examples will need to be edited so that they list you as 'bankruptcy attorney, personal injury attorney' etc.  *I strongly recommend that at least the first two categories you choose be Google's pre-set choices. If you'd like to see what possible pre-set category choices there are, use Mike Blumenthal's Google Places Category tool at: http://blumenthals.com/index.php?Google_LBC_Categories Be sure that your categories meet all of the guidelines and that you have listed no more than 5, and you should be fine. Thirdly, I have no idea why the cold-calling SEO said it was 'black hat' to optimize a local campaign for more than one area of practice. This is not logical. Perhaps there was a communication breakdown, or perhaps the caller simply didn't know what they were talking about. At any rate, it is very common for local business owners, be they dentists, lawyers or restaurant owners, to have different areas of specialization, and while it isn't okay to create a separate Place Page for each area of specialization, it's perfectly acceptable to categorize yourself in a variety of ways, so long as you are adhering to the guidelines. Hope this helps! Miriam

Hey Tommy, So for Vimeo videos, you actually don't need to include the a  video:content_locelement in the sitemap</video:content_loc>, but rather reference a player location for the content with the video:player_locmark-up.</video:player_loc> Google don't  actually need you to include both elements, as explained here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472 Vimeo's Flash or HTML5 iFrame player won't simply playback the uploaded content, but delivers a compressed version at a variable bitrate - so the original file is actually not the one you want the sitemap to reference. Moreover, Google cannot get through the Vimeo's cloud storage system and browse the original files anyway. The player location can be picked out of the embed code you have used for the video - and should look something like: http://player.vimeo.com/video/01013541 You will also probably want Google to be able to embed the video and auto-play it, so the player_loc markup should look like: <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://player.vimeo.com/video/01013541</video:player_loc> You can test you have the right URL, because you should be able to open the player URL when not logged into vimeo and still view the content (it will take up a whole browser window) Also, for best chances of getting a blended result with your Vimeo vids - ensure (as you have done) that the video is marked as private and not available to view within the vimeo community pages. If you have a vimeo pro account (which you should do if it's commercial content) you will want to disable the community pass. You should also make sure that you have allowed the video to be embedded anywhere (or at least your domain and google.com), but removed the "embed" button from the player in the player settings- as the code created here will only help to build links to your Vimeo account, rather than your actual domain. For general reference - The video file url will be somewhere on vimeos CDN, and will look something like http://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.vimeo.com/846/293/84629656.mov You can find it by logging into Vimeo, going to the video page and pulling the first part of the URL from the "download this video" link. I hope that's useful! let me know if you have any other problems/questions. Cheers, Phil

Hi Ayetti, Josh has given you one resource. I can give you some more. Here is an excellent article by Myles Anderson at Search Engine Land on the top 50 citation sources for both the USA and UK: http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938 Also, read David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors Report from 2011. This is the premiere survey in the Local Search Industry. Good comments and data about citations/directories there: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml Finally, go to GetListed.org (also a David Mihm product) and go through the process of entering your legal business name and zip code to see what results you get. Then read through the further information on the site about other places to list your business. You essentially have 2 choices - to do all submissions manually, or, to create your Google Place Page manually and then do a paid submission via either Localeze of Universal Business Listing. If you go the paid route, they submit the business to a ton of directories (can't remember the exact number off the top of my head but it's quite a few). If you do it manually, you have more exact control over where you list yourself and the details you provide on each listing. Then, beyond the regular local business indexes, there may be important industry-related directories where it would be good for your specific type of business to be listed. Those you will have to hunt for yourself. For example, if your products were Made-in-the-USA, you might want to find some little directories that focus specifically on that. Hopefully, these resources will be helpful to you. Good luck! Miriam

Sure, Here is a list of some content Moz and Distilled have done on Video. http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/creating-awesome-videos-for-seo/ http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/ http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/getting-links-and-seo-value-from-your-youtube-videos/ http://www.seomoz.org/q/best-way-to-host-video http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-stuff-done-by-video http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-vimeo-and-youtube http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

This is a great question and one that we have been trying to ascertain a definitive answer to. The best answer I have seen so far is here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/best-way-to-host-video Phil's responses and additional comments are particularly insightful.

Hello Brian! Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question, which is an excellent one. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to give you a helpful answer. The situation you describe is common enough for Google to actually have spoken up about it within one of the most recent updates of their guidelines (see: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528). The guidelines state: Some businesses may be located within a mall or a container store, which is a store that contains another business. If your business is within a container store or mall, and you'd like to include this information in your listing, specify the container store in parentheses in the business name field. For example, Starbucks (inside Safeway). This is meant to resolve situations like the ones you are describing of businesses being located within container stores, but the details you have provided throw a monkey wrench into the works. You are saying that your potential client has no physical address whatsoever at which to receive mail? Are you 100% sure he is correct about this? He doesn't have a suite number of anything like that within the mall? I would double check on this with him. If it turns out that he gave you the correct answer the first time around, then yes, there is going to be a significant problem here. The business, if new to Google Places, is very likely to be given the postcard-only verification option. If he can't receive mail, he's out of the game. In order to qualify for inclusion in Places, every business must have a legal business name, local area code phone number and physical street address. Without any one of those 3 items, the business doesn't qualify. Again, I would return to this franchise owner and make sure he is positive that he has no address. Having one is is only hope of inclusion. Best of luck! Miriam

Hi Tim, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question, which is a great one! I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Members are giving you some good suggestions. I'd like to add to this. I strongly recommend that you put more effort into your city landing pages than what you are describing. 4-5 sentences is really just a blurb - more like an intro than the content of a whole page. I recommend that you find more to say about each city in which the client serves than this. Then, if you have in the midst of this, a small list of the client's services/products, only a tiny percentage of what is on the page will be similar. Creating city landing pages is one of the most common tasks I accomplish for my clients, and I treat each city as being deserved of a full article. It's an approach I have seen work time and again and I highly recommend it! Hope this helps and best of luck! Miriam

Ed, this is part of the new Search Plus Your World feature that Google have recently released. If you look at your 2nd screenshot, each result details what the relationship is which in the majority seems to be from your Google Reader subscriptions.

The issue is, this isn't what the map location feature was designed for. If you take this approach, you're ultimately attempting to trick YT into thinking that your content is unique when it isn't and this will not be looked at kindly by Google. While your approach may work for now, the YouTube videos wont rank very well and you are putting yourself highly at risk of a spamming penalty in the future. I think the single video option with dynamic page could definitely work, but it might be tricky to get the one page to rank 100+ geographical terms An alternative might be not using YT to host, as Google can see the analytics info for YT and give negative quality metrics based on the fall out rate of the YouTube vids; which will inevitably be extremely high if it's an advert. I would recommend using Wistia - http://wistia.com/ which Moz use, as they have an automatic sitemap submission service which is very nicely put together and easy to use if you're scaling the content over a vast franchise. You could upload multiple versions of the same video with Wistia and create unique pages for each franchise location and then you should be able to get blended results for multiple geographical terms - especially if you hook the pages with the videos on to the Google Local listings. All that said, Google will be able to crack down on duplicate video in the future. Audio wave matching isn't that hard - they already do it for YouTube and will do it for other services in the future. If you can get away from totally duplicated videos, especially on the audio front, it would future proof you from Panda and other dupe content smack-downs. Maybe get a different actor (with appropriate regional accents) to do the VO for each franchise?

Hi Tommy, It's good to see you are thinking about Schema.org, it's here to stay. Anyway to answer your question, it doesn't need to be one or the other. You can add schema to your page and use a video sitemap. If you just want the video thumbnail to show up in the SERPS, using like Vimeo or Wistia should be sufficient. If you want to go even further, you could mark it up with Schema.org as follows: (this is an example from the website: http://schema.org/VideoObject <div< span="">itemprop="video" itemscope</div<> itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject"> Video: <span< span="">itemprop="name">Interview with the Foo Fighters</span<> <meta< span="">itemprop="duration" content="T1M33S" /></meta<> <meta< span="">itemprop="thumbnail"</meta<> content="foo-fighters-interview-thumb.jpg" /> <object< span="">...></object<> <param< span="">...></param<> <embed< span="">type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ...></embed<> <span< span="">itemprop="description">Catch this exclusive interview</span<> with Dave Grohl and the Food Fighters about their new album, Rope. Why not run tests? First you could add the video sitemap using Vimeo, let it get indexed and make sure the thumbnail is showing in the SERPS. You could then add a different title, description etc using schema and see which Google prefers. Alternatively, you could add both, for example, add 5 videos using Vimeo then another 5 using Schema.org markup. It would be interesting to see if Google display the Schema results as video thumbnails. If that sounds like too much work, I would just go with the Vimeo video sitemap rather than schema because we know it works. I hope this helps. Craig @CraigBradford

Hi Jaz, Although it is not a cheap service, but it is one of the best analytics for videos: http://wistia.com/ you can check how it works on: http://wistia.com/product/tracking Wistia is used by seoMoz also. I hope that helped, Istvan

I would definitely use schema.org Google and other search are trying to move from rdfa and harmonizing everything to be under schema.org

Hello Amit! Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Both Robert and WebFeat have contributed good remarks here. As it happens, I actually had a chance to discuss this very topic with a Google Places Help Forum Top Contributor not long ago. Here is the process they recommended: 1. Go to the spammy Place Page in question and use the Report A Problem link at the bottom of it to describe the issue you have observed. 2. Wait the requisite 4-6 weeks to see if you get a direct response from Google or if you see any action taken against the spammy listing. 3. If, after this period, nothing has happened, go to the Google Places Help Forum and open a thread there explaining the problem carefully. 4. If one of the Top Contributors flags your thread, it will be sent to Google's Vanessa Schneider who may then decide to take action. 5. However, in the case of large scale, really outrageous spam (let's say a company has 20 phony Place Pages in 20 different cities) you are better off coming directly to the Google Places Help Forum from the get-go rather than attempting to report them one by one. In this event, be prepared to show extensive documentation and to link to all of the examples. Be clear and thorough in describing what you observed, and then be patient to see if it goes anywhere. Good luck! Miriam

Thank you Miriam And likewise, some excellent points from yourself.

Hi Echo1, I suggest you open a new thread for this question. This system doesn't show new activity on old questions, so people are unlikely to notice it.

is that it, or are there any more specifics that count particularly for G-shopping?

I actually try them too for a while about a year of so ago but somehow I forgot about them. Thanks for the quick reply!