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I would be curious as to why you believe: "The reason being is that it can only be the local citations that is causing the following listing...to be rated above...," the other? First, your query term for the first link is: chartered accountants Swansea If you look at DRP (first link - Google Places), the categories they have chosen up to the continue... are: all accounting categories. When you look at Harris Basset the first category is accountant, and the next two are financial consultant and payroll... This does cause a problem. When you look at DRP, there address is ...Swansea Enterprise Park, Swansea, whereas HarrisBasset is ...Enterprise Park, Swansea, West Glamorgen... Also, you state the others have not claimed their places account yet the one you show, DRP, clearly states it is an owner verified listing. But, even more telling is that there are 3 citations on the Harris Basset Places page that all took place in two days. Is the company you paid to do the reviews the same one that stated the ludicrous assumption about local citation? Click on the names on each of the reviews and you will see that each reviewer posted two reviews to companies....The same two companies. If a lowly SEO guy can figure it out, trust me, the GOOGLE can. Even if only Swansea is chosen for a probability test, what is the likelihood that three reviewers for one company would have only two reviews each and that the second review was for the same second company? When you add in that the time frame of all six reviews is less than 3 weeks and that the second company was a window and conservatory company (really, they did not know each other but all three purchased windows within a week of one another and then, purchased accounting within 24 hours of one another). So, you may need a real SEO team to handle your local representation. There are white hat ways to get citations from real Harris Basset clients (assuming HB has clients that are happy of course) posted on Places and other sites. Even with those methods, I never allow my team to have immediate posts one after the other for a client site. It is just too likely to cause an alert in my opinion. I could go on and on about how these reviews were written but it would be overkill. Sorry to beat that long dead horse, but this is stuff that I see every day. Work on getting the real clients to review over a period of time and clean up the categories. All the best,

If this is a real business with real long term plans I would use the branded domain name. This feels more professional and as a business owner I would rather be identified with my company name on the internet rather than city+service.com. On the other hand you can use the keyword domain to have two listings on Google. Question is, are you will doing to put in the time!!!

Hi Again OCsearch, If they've got just one office, then yes, having one Place Page would be an accurate representation of the business. I sympathize with how inadequate a solution this is for clients with business models like your client's. The alternative to this is for the business to change the way it thinks about its employees and assign one in each district as a sub-branch of the business. Let me explain this a little more thoroughly: Let's say the business is located in San Francisco. They create and claim a Place Page for their home office. Then, let's also say that the business sends out truckers from Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and San Diego. Let's say that the business is willing to create a new position for one employee in each of those cities - let's call him the city manager. The city manager's duties involve overseeing the job assignments for each of the truckers in his city. And, his home address is now viewed as a local office for the main company. He is given a unique local area code phone number and mail relating to operations in his city is now to be directed to his home instead of the company headquarters in San Francisco. If this were the business model, then I think it would be conceivable for each city manager to have his own Place Page for his sub-branch of the company. It's a big workaround, but not an impossible one. Barring this, then, yes...one Place Page for the main office and the rest of your work will have to be organic. And, the client should understand that he should not expect to outrank businesses with physical addresses in other cities. Does this explanation help? I hope so! Miriam

You should be fine. I think Google is going to get smarter and smarter at recognizing the same video, but if it's relevant to the page and there is other supporting content, it is adding to the user experience and you'll be ok. Another option to consider on certain videos is to create a 2nd video (in Wistia). Essentially it's the same upload, but a new file with unique title/description etc. YouTube doesn't let you do this, but you'll be fine in Wistia. This could come into play if there is the same video with a sightly different context that needs to be on 2 pages. One question I'm pondering is the situation where a 'how to' video get's the attention of prominent bloggers. Let's say 15 big blogs in your industry all use the embed code (if you make it available) to post the video in a post of their own. This A) should benefit with by receiving a backlink, but B) does this complicate the waters from the Search Engine's perspective? I guess it's still on your video sitemap, and Google should know that you're the original source. We just started on Wistia, after a few years on BrightCove and experience with a bunch of others. Pretty cool platform, plus I hear a new (and much more flexible) player is coming out in December. Exciting!

Hi Bjolley, Thanks for coming to the forum to ask your question! I'm glad to see Members contributing their thoughts, but think a point needs to be clarified here. This is not a case of claiming the 'best' profile and making it your client's authoritative Place Page  - it is a case of claiming the CORRECT profile - the one for the business' legitimate location. At this point, if this were my client, I would not be worrying about losing a few reviews on his phony Place Pages. I'd be sweating whether his account would be penalized before I could report the bogus listings through Google's report a problem link. Now, that being said, I have seen cases where Google has accidentally displayed the reviews for one geographic location on another location's Place Page, but so far as I know, there is no way to save the reviews. Tell the client they are lucky you are trying to clean up the mess and that going forward, they will need to work on building up new reviews over time to replace what has been lost. As a final thought, before you report the incorrect Place Pages, why not copy the good reviews and use them as testimonials on the client's website? You might even try doing this with hReview markup code to see if Google will eventually pick them back up again and display them on the authoritative Place Page. But first things first...tell the client you've got to get that record cleaned up as best you can, and fast! Good luck to you! Miriam

We have hundreds of images on our site, would it be best to rename all of the images and update their tags in one sweeping change or trickle the changes, uploading changed images every other day or so? It makes no difference to search engines. Do whatever is best for you. Search engines generally crawl a small percentage of your site each day. Even if you change your entire site at once, they will only see about 5% of the changes today, then another 5% tomorrow and so on.

I know the probklem, unfortunatly there is not much you can do. if there is not enouth in the plumbers in the map, they will zoom out, soif you can remove enouth cheaters you may get in. google will remove the cheaters if you click report a problem.

Thanks Richard. I figured, but wanted to double check. thanks again

Well i would of doubted it, but after reading your post you have convinced me, but i suggest that it would not work as well as same lingo, there would be times it would not be able to work it out. also i remeber Matt Cutts saying how many lingos they can translate, I was suprised it was not that many.

The answer is yes and yes, Yes it is helpful for rankings, And Yes it will get you in trouble. I did this i had "product city " as the title, it worked for a long time, but google have steped up their review of thes listings and my account was supsened. It ttok aboy 6 weeks to get back online. this was not just for te offending places but all my listings for all my clients. so i advice dont do it.

Hi James, you're welcome, am glad to have helped. I agree it's important to maintain your current US rankings as your target audience are initially in the US (before they travel over here on vacation). ~ To cater for local search in London on your existing website, I'd suggest creating a Local page for 'London Tours' or similar. Within this page, include some local content, such as a local address of a booking office if you have one, a local telephone number, some content based around the location of these tours, such as the West End, Westminster... Make sure that this page can be easily navigated to from the homepage. Inbound links from other local businesses, review sites etc will help the page to get noticed and recognised as an authoritative page for London tours. If you can include this new local page as a listing in Google Places that will likely help, you should be able to as the business really does operate from the location of London, those local details will be essential for this. ~ Hope some of that may help you further. Regards, Simon

@irvingw can you elaborate on "standard on page optimization"?  I familar with best practices for keywords, page titles, meta descriptions, and images, but not for videos. Thanks

About 2 weeks ago - just not making sense as I have followed every guide on how to improve the local search ranking and nothing seems to be working, coupled with the fact that the listings that are appearing at the top are just basic listings some of which have not even been claimed! For me ot seems that the main ranking factor when it comes to local search is the TITLE tag on your sites homepage coupled with the onpage text if this contains the keyword you are searching on then they appear first in the local listings - Reviews, Offers, Claimed listings, Photos etc mean very little in the Google ranking system for local If I am wrong I would be interested to hear what I have missed on my local places listing to get it in the top 3 local search results for Chartered Accountant Swansea Accountants Swansea

i should also add, i was putting location in the title of the google places, worked well, but now they review them much more closly. i get supspened along with all my clients that i control. not just those that I did the trickk with. It took about 6 weeks to get back on.

Thanks for the "YSlow" very good tool.

I use You Tube and Vimeo Plus. And also Amazon S3 with EasyVideoPlayer.