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Hi Carlos, Good thread! You're dealing with 2 separate issues, as I see it. Issue 1 - Your customer shouldn't be leaving you back-to-back reviews on any platform. If you know this customer and can ask him to remove one of his reviews, that would be wise. Issue 2 - The fact that both locations are no longer showing in the local pack for your search term may have nothing to do with your customer's odd review activity. Rather, it may have to do with competition. Unless you have few competitors, it's not terribly common to have more than 1 location show in the same pack for a product or service search. So, just looking for 'printing houston', Google may choose to only show your business once, regardless of you having 2 locations. Branded searches are different. If I look up 'Whole Foods Houston', Google is likely to show me multiple Whole Foods locations all in the same pack. So, you may simply be dealing with the presence of competition in your city, in which case, thinking about this from a hyperlocal standpoint may be your best bet. For more on this, see: http://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid That being said, it's always wise to keep an eye on your reviews and if a customer has somehow gotten the wrong idea about helping you by posting multiple reviews, outreach to them would be very smart. It wouldn't be good if Google wrongly decided this was some sort of spammy campaign on the part of your business. You can also petition Google now to have a review removed: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/04/03/new-google-support-option-offers-a-form-to-contest-reviews/ Hope this helps!

Hey Noah, The profile looks fine. For the facade, I suggest only changing either the Profile picture or the Cover because it's sexier if they are different. Good day,

Thanks Miriam, the problem is that for each franchise territory we only have 1 physical location any often 30+ locations within that territory where we want to rank. Perhaps I should place an image of the phone number to avoid this as from a usability perspective its annoying not to have the phone number readily available?

Hello Donford, Yes, he is my competitor and sometimes I feel that he also copy my content. Mobilnishop is the leading site, but on the end it looks that google does not see that. You should search on google.rs Similar things is the pictures, specifications and frame, but text ( content) is different and form my point of view, my is much richer.

It'd be a good idea to contact the customer and ask for their permission first, and if everything is a go it's fine to promote the positive review. It could also make a nice addition to a page where you collect them, if you have something up and running like that. Cheers!

We really like YotPo - for a few reasons.  As an e-commerce site, submitting reviews by customers can be a hassle - as most "native" review systems require the customer to come to your site, login, and then write the review.  YotPo has a a really cool system where they send the emails and those emails are so special, the customer need only write the review IN THE EMAIL they are looking at - not sure how this works technically - but YotPo will get you a lot more reviews than any native ecommerce system. In our experience, YotPo does require tech-saavy integration to get the full features.  One of these is to allow for crawl-able reviews.  IT IS DO-ABLE, but you need to look for their advanced integration instructions.  This has something to do with the review content being seen by google as being on 3rd party site, and thus not part of your site.  Trust me, you CAN fix this with Yotpo. I do hope this is helpful.

Hi Jared! You're very welcome, and I'm glad to know this will be helpful to you. Have a good weekend!

I do get myassignmenthelp scam as a suggestion I am afraid.  There are quite a few similar suggestions coming up as well.  You can check them at ubersuggest.org "Is this work of a hacker..." Impossible to say for sure based on how much I've looked at it, but if those domains are legit then I would say that it probably is. It looks like a hacked wordpress plugin or something allowing them to create additional pages.  It's quite clever really. If there is a referring URL it  doesn't redirect. So, if you follow the link from a search result (or anywhere else) it redirects, but you can view the page if you do directly - or if you are a web crawler. "Most Imp how do I counter this without  starting a spam-war???" Tricky.  I'd start by setting up alerts to find any new occurrences.  I'd be looking to try and contact the owners of every website this vulnerability is being used on.  I don't think that Google has a means of reporting redirects, only malware.

Thanks everybody!

Hello John, Internal linking is fairly important aspect of your SEO strategy, although predominantly from a crawling and accessibility perspective. It also ensures that you do not create a "spider trap" (a scenario where Googlebot gets trapped crawling your website due to cyclical linking patterns) which can cause it to de-index your work. This is an extreme case and the algorithms that guide the process are getting better but it still helps to make your site as open as possible. I will start with some general sources on internal linking: http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link - General Overview and Beginners Guide http://moz.com/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday - Guide to Internal Linking Best Practices (Oldie but a Goodie) http://moz.com/webinars/internal-linking-a-scientific-scalable-approach - Detailed and Lengthy Explanation Start with these 3 resources - each of them contain further sources for future study which will help you with your strategy. There isn't anything particularly difficult about internal link-building, you just have to keep plugging away. Hope this helps and feel free to fire some questions in my direction. Rob

Michael, Another avenue you could consider is to create and print out a simple business card sized instruction note (cheap from VistaPrint). You keep these at your counter/front desk and when a customer is checking out, you can simply provide that to them and ask after they check out. We have worked with dentists and a party rental shop with 4 locations who had some decent success with this strategy. _EDIT: You can also create the same card and offer an incentive on there for their next trip into the store or office, sort of what Jed was getting at above. _ You are merely asking them for a review and handing them a card with some simple instructions to follow at their leisure from the phone or computer. You also avoid any potential "red flags" which a large email blast could generate with lots of people simultaneously leaving reviews on a given day or week. Google sees this as "solicitation" in their terms for receiving reviews. Google wants you to EARN reviews, so stick with more natural approaches to this process and you'll see results and steer clear of any Google mishaps Hope this was helpful!! - Patrick

You're very welcome, Jamie!

If the use of the reviews is for the purpose of user experience there are review aggregates that will share reviews between two domains without placing them in the source code. This will leave out duplicate content penalties and it will not have any effect on SEO. Since the reviews will not be in the code, there will be no positive or negative SEO effects. Yotpo is an aggregate that displays reviews like an RSS feed, and it leaves them out of the source code.

If your pages are correctly marked up with Schema you don't don't need to submit them to anything and even if it marked up correctly, it's still up to Google to decide if they give you the rich snippets, or not. ie. Simply having the correct markup does not guarantee you the rich snippets!

Hi Ron, As I mentioned above, one business will be closing down soon and in the meantime I am just trying to minimize problems like this. That is why I have hesitated to set up a full set of directory listings for the new business until the other is ready to fully step down and out of the picture. But maybe it is time to revisit that idea. And thanks for the information about the USPS database... I never even considered this before.

Hello Shawn, I like the logo resizing on that page. It looks like you're including star ratings, and I don't see any ratings on the page. If the page doesn't include the information it shouldn't be in the source code either. Otherwise it looked good. I tested it in the Structured Data Testing Tool and didn't see any errors reported, and the ratings showed up int the SERPs. Are you still experiencing problems or is this resolved?

I think you should use a review aggregator like YotPo. These will deliver reviews to your contractor's sites without duplicating the content because the content won't be in the source code. Any plug in you can design will prevent duplicate content. You will basically display the content without it being in the code. The only HTML the robot will see is the coding for the review system.

Sort of related: If I have 2 office locations in 2 different cities, should I list the website homepage URL on the Google Plus pages, or should I list the specific contact us page URL for the office location that is on the company website? Does it make a difference? Thanks!

hello, Embedding reviews is not a problem, as long as you ensure it doesn't get indexed by search engines. Best way to achieve that is to create a separate script which is called in an iframe. This script is the one where you make calls for the reviews from google + or any other source that you may wish to use, and ensure this script is include in your robots.txt as a file which is not be crawled. Hope this helps.

Hi Sam! It might be helpful to start with a little clarification here - in Local SEO, the term 'testimonials' tends to indicate direct-to-business owner content while the term 'reviews' typically indicates content that exists on a third party platform. In researching this topic, it would likely be better to search for 'reviews' rather than 'testimonials' as you are talking about third party reviews. Mike Blumenthal wrote a great little post about this earlier this year: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/04/24/using-google-reviews-on-your-website/ Hope it helps!