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I followed the steps I read in some help forums - basically deleting it from one account and then claiming it again. I just had to answer my phone to get a PIN and it all took just a day or two.. http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/search.py?ctx=en:searchbox&query=transfer

no problem I've done it before

Thanks for the responses guys... The specific location based weather pages have been optimised within the page titles. As you suggest, I've been targeting high authority local websites that provide specific local content (sport, lifestyle, events, news etc). This seems to be the only solution to the problem in trying to increase our ranking for these pages, any other suggestions would be much appreciated

2 sides to this, 1. Protecting brand and 2. Just want more results for a keyword. With regards protecting brand, using other sites worked best for me. Putting YouTube content on mydomain.tv, putting company info on a .info, creating my own affiliate sites with brand name in the URL. A few of these and you can control the first page for your brand quite easily. Also with language Googles assigning a folder to a language in WMT and building links from those language sites into it seems to give me an easy 1-2 with /county/ first and plain dot com second. For getting more results in on a specific keyword, yes pdfs or other media types (either youtube videos or host my own and make a video sitemap). If you can get into Google News (depends what kind of site you have) that's good. Plus getting a few Twitter accounts to tweet about the keyword can get you to show up. Both ideas kind of overlap but I find the domains provides more stable control where as the other media varies wildy by search.

That's the one! Thank you Rand!

Assuming all NPA (Name, Phone, Address) are identical to Google Places Page It might take a while for google to include these reviews or Citations to your Google Places page. so I assume giving more time will resolve your questions, but Keep building Citations to your Google profile Page in the mean time.

Make sure you have unique content (phone number, hours, address) on each city URL you want to use, pictures are a big plus. Use the bulk upload, see https://www.google.com/local/add/g?hl=en-US&gl=US#uploadfeed. Before you submit make sure to read, http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?answer=178024 and http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=28247&topic=28291&answer=173669 Make the name in your bulk upload spreadsheet unique for each location (Business Name - City, State) Use the store code field which uniquely identifies each location of your business Fill in as many of the "optional" fields as possible that make sense for your business Use a different phone number for each location Use a unique description for each location Those are my 7 top tips; I'll add more if I think of any. Two other options that may help but I have no real experience/proof on is advertising your locations with Google Boost  and Google Tags. If you are legit & spend money you may be able to get your account rep to coughhelp/pullstringcough

Google will automatically pickup the reviews from other sites but you can increase the speed of sync by making sure your profile is an exact match on the review sites. It is highly recommended that you take over the ownership of your profile on each of the top local review sites and optimize your business information. We have tested this technique and it worked well. Here are the details of the test. Sample - Business A - New Google Place account and exact matching Judysbook.com + Citysearch account (exact headline, address, and tel#). Business B - New Google Place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account with a different headline but same phone number and address. Business C - New Google place account and JJudysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different phone # but same address and headline. Business D - New Google place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different address but same headline and phone #. Submit each Judysbook.com + Citysearch account landing page to Twitter and digg manually one time only after reviews have been added. (Spam free Twitter account with 2000+ followers and clean Digg account with 50+ followers and regular diggs) Outcome Google picked up the reviews from Judysbook.com for A and Citysearch account for B. Note - Google only picked up 1 or 2 reviews for both A and B from the review site so there could be some special algorithm in place for selecting the reviews based on quality. I will be writing a blog post on my blog on this study soon. Hope this helps. Sameer