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Thanks guys! Very helpful!

To get into google news you have to convince them that you are in the news business, that you are an "organization", that you are publishing original, news-worthy content and that you are not a guy or two trying to toss pages into their news SERPs. If you have a simple press release getting it into google news will involve going straight to a website that already appears in google news and getting them to feature your story.   A very small number of press release sites can get their releases into google news.  Check with them before you submit to be sure that they can make it happen.

Hi Gemellak, Yes i have scrape box and am tryng my best to find the top 100 but using: custom footprint: site:google.co.uk and the keyword yields a mish mash of results which dont tally to the Goolge top 100. Any ideas on a search operator that may work I know that the Google advanced URI is  &=num100 but i cant seem to get this working inside scrapebox any help is much appreciated. If i cant get scrapebox working Im going to have to write my own script Regards Christian

Hi Steve, Of the 122 listings that I submitted, 85 were rejected. They were rejected in chunks, but those chunks don't necessarily share similar elements. Each agent has their own location, email and phone number. The website is the only shared contact information. If this is because I submitted them all in one sitting, should I spread them out over the course of a week or two? Can I resubmit a listing on Yahoo! after it's been rejected? Thank you so much for your help! Caitlin

Casey, Thanks for explaining it in detail. I am going to place an order. Please notify me when the 2010 conference and 2011 conference video is available. Thanks -David

Greetings, Pablo, You are allowed to have one Place Page for each city in which you have a unique physical address and unique local area code phone number. Some people do choose to list a few service area cities by name in the Additional Details section of the Place Page, but don't go overboard with this. There is no 'legal' limit, set by Google, but there is some thought that if you do too much of this, it can result in a drop in your rank. I would advise you to remember that it is your website, and not your Place Page, that has the greatest impact on rank. Because of this, I would keep the Place Page simple, and use the pages of your website for optimizing for multiple cities in which you serve.

I'll be honest in saying I had a couple of sites affected by the panda/farmer update but saw no changes in image search so I really don't think this has anything to do with these updates.  Additionally many have said that if your query drops were not on these update days then you should be looking elsewhere. Have you seen anything that indicates any loss around the dates shown in my original attachment?  I have a few other similar niche sites which both more and less content than the above described one which saw no changes which additionally says to me that this has nothing to do with the farmer updates. If anyone else has noticed losses in image search I'd be very interested in sharing data.  And the same for anyone who's simply seen a loss of "image search" queries at anytime.  This is a first for me and I'd love to find someone who has been in the same boat (the image boat).

In my opinion you should claim both listings so you can at least control them until it gets resolved. The problem you with with deactivating either one of them is potentially losing any authority from the deactivated listing. Thats why I recommend contacting Google to merge them. But a good short term fix is to claim both listings and update them to have same/similar info, but you are still potentially splitting citation authority over 2 listings potentially.

Hi, this is the search result I get in Google images (top left is my photo): http://goo.gl/uv0ZC. I originally used the image for a different blog, this is the image link: http://goo.gl/JINOh. What baffles me is that they seem to have "attached" the image to a direct download, I suppose placing the image at a page that is a download page - not visible in search but scannable by Google so that the image appears listed in Google images to dupe people into downloading an application..?

Hi Keri Thank you for your succinct and very helpful answer - no wonder I couldn't find it, but did find out a lot on how to prune Wysteria!! Best wishes

Hi Storwell, Thanks for being a good sport, and it definitely sounds to me as if you are experiencing heavy lag time between citations being created and being imported into your Place Page. It can take months for this to happen. Given the vagaries of Google's Local product, your other citations could show up tomorrow, next month or never. I know how frustrating this is. I wonder, have you started a thread about this at the Google Places Help Forum to see if you can trigger a response from a Google rep? It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does and you may either get A) a response or B) a spine tingling mysterious edit. I've seen both happen. If you do decide to create a thread there, make it as simple but thorough as possible. Obviously, give your business info and link to your Place Page. Then, I would suggest that you cite the 5 biggest citations sources where you are cited but which aren't being shown on your Place Page. I would put them in a simple list, with links to the citations. My bet is that you will get other forum members chiming in over there with, "it takes patience, just wait it out." But, if you could ask a rep for a general idea of when you might expect to see these appearing on your Place Page, you just might get a response. Good luck!

Oh I see. Well I wouldn't worry about it. Google rarely treats reciprocal links badly, so I highly doubt they would hurt you for linking to a page that only mentions you without a link.

Yes for both questions. Maintining the N.A.P(Name, Phone, Address) with your google places page and your website and with all local directories and basically all web properties are crucial for ranking, as it shown here  by David Mihm. Having your NAP on other web properties are called "Citations" and these are considered like links to your actual website. so the more you have uniformed NAP citations accross multiple web properties will increase rankings.

I don't have experience in the local arena, but I have heard good things about Get Listed (http://getlisted.org/), and in general it's a good thing to have some way to make sure that your NAP (name, address, phone) are in a consistent format across all of the different online listings.

You have me stumped! There is a person in the Official Google Base Blog. Her name is celebird or something like that. I think you should ask her OR post you question there at the blog. Sorry I couldn't help, but I tried.

That's great! I'd love to see how your campaign progresses. Keep me in the loop!