Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Chris, As Andy has correctly stated, virtual businesses are not eligible for inclusion in Google's local products. In order to qualify, a business must: 1. Have a unique, physical street address (no PO boxes, virtual offices or shared addresses) 2. Have a unique, local area code phone number (not a toll free number or a shared number) 3. Have in-person transactions with its customers, either at the place of business (like a restaurant), or at the customers' locations (like a plumber). If your company doesn't meet all 3 of these criteria, then it doesn't qualify. Thanks for asking a good question.

Yeah definitely!

Must understanding is you can create multiple Business Pages. You should be able to do that by visiting this URL: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php (when logged in). You may want to use a different name for each page being sure to include the business name. For example: For a business named "Pizza Place" with 3 locations west, south, and east, the pages might be named "Pizza Place West", "Pizza Place South", and "Pizza Place East", respectively. Then use the appropriate address on each page. From what I know of the Business Pages, you can't have more than one address per page. Hope this helps!

Sounds like a solid plan. Keep your +1 buttons visible, use your Google+ account to engage with others, and keep growing your visibility over time.

Thanks.  I will take a look.

Hi Brian, yes indeed it is worth it. But don't just take our word for it, take the word of many others in the industry: Use it to increase traffic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-author-photos. I built my profile for this express purpose. Authorship is important too and you need a Google+ profile to hook things together. Danny Sullivan provides examples where Google+ is pushed over the other social networks. How to take advantage of Google+: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tips-to-use-google-for-seo. There are too many reasons to do it and not one reason not to (IMO).

I think the far better answer is to simply include a link to the Facebook page in the newsletter and invite people to like the page from there.  Believe it or not, there are some people who are not on Facebook, so getting an email inviting them to like the page would be worthless.  I think the minimal likes you'd get out of it is not worth the risk of being viewed as a spammer.

Thanks David, but at this point that information is outdated. I recently sent a request directly to Facebook regarding this issue - but at the current time, there doesn't seem to be a way to combine the two (at least that I, or anyone I've spoken to can find).

Ok thank you.

I'm certainly not an expert, and I'm not sure this will help, but... ...if you're formatting it with the brackets as in the example above, the tag may not authenticate properly. Try removing the brackets, like so:

Just some quick ideas for you Firstly i cant get to your facebook etc pages from site - i can only like etc . Leverages your audience-  i would do something for links with a strong blog or site who wants to get infront of that big social audience of yours. Have them create content for you to put on your site that might attract attention and links. Have them Share and spread the love links will follow

"Google is currently looking for a way to measure the quality of people's Facebook and Twitter followers. This is to prevent companies from being rewarded for simply creating a bunch of fake profiles to "like" their own page in order to look more popular. " Kind of seems like what the Google Algo is doing rooting out spammy sites (fake profiles) "Right now, there is no way to measure this. " Sort of like Pagerank. If somebody is a big celebrity and 1m people follow them they will rank high. If they only follow 100 people--chances our those 100 are pretty important as well and will rank them a bit higher because of it (just like links).

I don't mean to self promote, but we do some pretty nifty training sessions and workshops. There's a taster of what goes on here: Some training We're only just up the road If budget is an issue, we do the same courses / workshops in Bristol and Somerset for enter[rise agencies, which are part funded by the gov't. Let me know if you need more details.

Hey James, From what I can gather from Google on this, a business page can be set as the rel publisher from the homepage only, and subsequent pages assigned to an individual for authorship. However, I wouldn't worry about transferring social accounts over as you can, if you wish, just add these as links which will show in the G+ business page About, including a link to your website. As long as Google can see the 'circle-of-trust' from your site, to your G+ account and back again, then all is good. Perhaps I haven't been watching or taking notice, but I cant see I have ever seen a brand picked up as an author for anything. Hope this helps, Andy

Thanks for the answer, yes, I would agree that it is definitely a case of trying to maintain a consistent profile and also to avoid confusing users - hopefully that is how the SE's see it.

Yeah, I'm not really interested in buying "likes", I am looking for other people that are interested in Social Networking. A network the size of this forum can provide enough real social profiles to create a powerful group.

Social signals are the nearest thing to crawlers having human eyes.  There's a pie chart somewhere on SEOmoz about this, I think social was about 7% of what search engines take into account.

Apart from the SEO benefit from the link pointing back to your site in the byline, if no one clicks through to your site, shares or comments on the article then no it's not successful. The idea of guest blogging is to generate exposure for your brand, I generally measure success by the level of shares, comments and click-throughs. But that's just me.

Thank you for these resources, they've helped a lot in trying to figure out the Google+ vs Local issue. Unfortunately, it looks like my client is best suited to wait it out - He tends to be an action-first type of person, so it looks like I have some convincing ahead of me I think one of the comments on the blog post was dead on when they said "You know someone said the abilty to make complicated things simple is genius. Well.. Google is no genius!" Hopefully this is just a temporary confusion that will work itself out for business owners as Google continues to perfect the merge...