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The way our site is structured, it might pull the business data from one specific source. If we wrap our business NAP data in Schema, it might display that way on the category pages. As I linked above, Home Advisor uses Schema on category pages and I'm not sure why, so I thought I'd ask. It seems nobody is sure why. 1. Okay. 2. They're all using different things and getting different results. TripAdvisor uses RDFa, I believe, which doesn't exactly help me. I guess I'll just have to play around with them and see which works best.

"unless the old subdomain was something like reviews.newdomain.com and now you moving them to newdomain.com/reviews." That is the case. Was "Store.domain.com" and now is "domain.com". Was previously two sites and the one I am dumping was the subdomain. Thanks for hanging in there and answering this thing!

Always happy to see your questions come in, Ruben!

I think Miriam nailed it. Smart advice as well using a home address is not a bad idea at all. Think of all the fantastic companies that started it either in the garage Which Google would consider their home / place of business. If you have a legitimate local listing your all set as you grow and acquire an office or whatever type of facility it is that you need to do business in you will have no problem with Google when making the change. Sincerely, Thomas

I'd check the terms of service on the site, and see if you're allowed to use the reviews on your own site, too.

Andrew, I wouldn't put crawlable versions of reviews found on other sites on my product pages for the same reason you are concerned. You could put them in an iFrame, which should take care of the issue. However, in order to get the star ratings in the SERPs the Schema markup for aggregate ratings should be outside of that iframe. An aggregate rating doesn't include the review copy since it is including all of the reviews (e.g. 4 out of 5 stars based on 320 reviews). Meanwhile, I would be working on getting your own unique, real reviews up on your site so you benefit from the user-generated content that nobody else has.

i think my solution will be a unique exterior storefront image of each location and then 9 images that show the range of products and services offered at all locations, using the same 9 images on all like brand profiles.  so, the primary image will be unique and the 9 supporting images will be the same across each brand (200-300 locations each). If a location wants to go the extra mile and send me 9 unique images to use, I will add those as provided, but not make it a requirement. the logistics of trying to get 921 busy business owners to send me 10 images that meet my requirements is nearly impossible, so I have to be realistic in my solution for now.

i ran into the same problem i now use shopperapproved and they're quite cheap (http://www.shopperapproved.com/pricing.php) you can email customers a link, put javascript code on your thank you page so that they get a customer survey and then they get emailed a request to do a full survey later on plus you can feed it to google

Hi Alex, Thank you for your insight and words of wisdom. It's comforting to know that using G+ Social, NAP (company name, address, telephone number), marker location and website url can be changed without losing user reviews. Thanks Mark

Hi Oliver, "Ratings in Google Product Search consist of an aggregate ratings score with snippets of customer reviews from third party sites and from Google Checkout which are based on your store name and the registered domain." These ratings from Google come from _"various sources" _including: Bizrate(Shopzilla), Pricegrabber, Epinions, Yahoo, Review Centre, Viewpoints, Google Checkout Reviews, Reseller Ratings, Trustpilot, RateItAll.com, eKomi, and more. To read more the above is taken from here PS Google Checkout is no longer a place where reviews can be acquired as it is being cut. Hope this Helps!

Hi Bryan, In order for a business to qualify for inclusion in Google's local pack of results, it must meet the following criteria: Have a unique, staffed, physical address. This cannot be a virtual office or P.O. box. 2. Have a unique local area code phone number. Not toll free, vanity or call tracking numbers. 3. Have face-to-face transactions with customers, either at the place of business (like a dentist) or at the customers' locations (like a plumber). If the business can say 'yes' to ALL THREE of these things, then it qualifies, and it's time to read the Google Places Quality Guidelines to become acquainted with all of Google's various policies. See: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en If the business cannot say yes to any of the above or fails to meet any of the criteria in the Google Places Quality Guidelines, then it should not pursue Google local pack rankings. It's very important to understand Google's bias toward physical locale. Most businesses can strive to achieve local pack rankings only for their city of location. In other words, a plumber located in San Jose, California can hope to achieve local results for searches that include the term 'san jose' or that stem from San Jose-based devices. He cannot typically expect to appear in the local pack for his additional service cities where he lacks a physical location. Instead, he must pursue organic rankings for these location-less cities. There are exceptions to this in scenarios of low competition. For example, if your business is one of only two chimney sweep companies serving 5 different cities, there is a chance that Google may surface you in the local pack for more than one city, simply because their is little competition and there are few choices. This is typically the exception rather than the rule, however. Pursuing organic rankings for your additional service cities involves the creation of city landing pages. You can read more about this here: http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403 Pursuing high local rankings involves a ton of different efforts. You might find these resources helpful: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide So, the first step is to determine how the business model fits in with Google's view of local businesses and then proceed accordingly.

HI! There are a number of things I want to address in your situation, so please bear with me. First, I can't see the site, so I can't verify the content on your site as 100% unique, relevant, and design with the user experience in mind. You need more than just reviews and images to have a great page, so if that isn't already the case, that is the first place to start. For any user search, ask what the best page is and beat that in terms of content. If you aren't sure how to be better than the best, find users that are looking for that via surveys and ask them. Second, I am assuming a number of things. It sounds like your site just launched late 2013. This is based on your timeline and relatively low DA. If that is true and your timeline is accurate, you should be going through some major fluctuations. Your site is new, which means Google is actively testing it's content. Your rankings will change heavily in the first few months. You then noticed a number of onpage issues, and those were just changed as of last week. It's going to take some time for that information to be updated. Third, based on the above and what I've seen in the past, it's very normal for your rankings to fluctuate. If you're checking by a rank checker tool, it'll fluctuate as none of them are accurate right now. If you're checking yourself, then the same IP is looking it up repeatedly, acting like a rank checker. Normal users can see ranking fluctuations per day based on the tons of factors that go into ranking. I would highly suggest not tracking ranking, but rather watching the organic search traffic going to the page you are targeting here. That's the only way to show real success. Fourth, tracking domain authority over time is not valid. Domain Authority change numbers based on the Moz data set. You could "lose" domain authority in one time period and still get more traffic. DA is only to be used in comparison to other sites related to you. In the end, be patient, focus on your content and track organic traffic to important URLs to see how things are performing.

Hi CyberAllen, Please check out the Moz infographic for the Local Search Ecosystem 2013: http://moz.com/blog/2013-local-search-ecosystems This will show you the many places from which Google pulls data. Often, Google will automatically create a local business listing for any business it finds information about. But, if you're looking to get a business listed that you are promoting, follow Moosa's instructions, provided that the business in question is compliant with all of the following guidelines: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en

Behind what you describe is "google suggest" - it`s the same thing that auto completes your search queries (if you want). I am afraid to tell you that you cant control what other users will see under "people also search for"... well of course there is an indirect option by being the one who is (one of) the most visited studios (I mean by clicks not by real visits). Of course this doesnt work just by clicking on your links as much as possible... just be likeable for potential visitors and the numbers will grow. And as these numbers grow, you will have a very big chance to be mentioned there. If you use chrome you can (try to) turn of google suggest by unchecking the box for this feature under the settings menu (privacy).

It's definitely us down under here in Australia.  The thing I would recommend is getting started on reconfirming your categories and your listing addresses now.  Google has started heavily validating categories and making sure only one of each type of business is at an address (is it possible to have 8 photographers in one building?  Sure, but not likely.) Just review things now, while you have the chance. We're re-validating a LOT of clients and it's a lot of work.

Anthony has some good advice here. Now that it's been almost a month, have the SERPs changed at all? Has this review gone down?

"They should do a study on who is leaving.  I bet who is leaving has a higher average rep score than the people who are stayin'," Sadly for the investors at times its the quantity that matters vs quality of people on the network...

Hey, It will be very unfair to advise without analyzing website in terms of On Page and Back-links. Just a favor, similar issue happened with one of our USA based client last week. Complete collapse in rankings suddenly but rankings got backed within 2 days. That was mysterious. I wish the same for your client! Still, without analysis, we can't identify issues! There could be one or more reasons Some Sort of Robot Back-links Issues (Anchors, Diversity, Quality) or others.

Thanks Miriam, I actually reached out to Phil before posting here, I know he is very knowledgeable in this space. Do you know anything about Facebook reviews? Are they important enough to go after them?

Hi Guy, Edmond has give some thoughtful feedback. The one suggestion I would be careful of is the one in which a central device at an office is being used to encourage reviews. If reviews stem from the same IP address (known as a review kiosk) they are likely to be flagged by Google as spam, so that is not something I would recommend. I would also be careful about offering incentives for reviews. Google's stance on this has been very strange, and is worth researching. Beyond this, though, having print materials to hand to the client at the time of service is a great idea, as is educating key members of the staff to request reviews. Whitespark has a great, free handout that you can brand with your own company logo that gives directions for leaving a Google+ Local review. You'll find it here: http://www.whitespark.ca/review-handout-generator/ *Just remember, the one review platform on which you cannot ask for reviews is Yelp. Their guidelines forbid soliciting reviews in any way. Additionally, if you have good customers who simply are not going to go on the Internet to leave you a review, but who would be happy to give you a hand written testimonial, you could get them to write you one at the the time of service, or in a follow up email, and you can turn these into testimonials you post on your website. You can use Schema review markup to encode these reviews, giving you a chance that Google will display stars on your results in the search engine results. This is a good solution for customers who are not tech savvy. Remember, no business needs to earn a huge number of reviews all at once. A little, slow trickle of them over time is a much better signal than a whole bunch at once. Here's a post I like, by Phil Rozek, about Google+ Local reviews. I think you might like it, too: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/04/the-complete-guide-to-google-pluslocal-reviews-and-especially-how-to-get-them/ Hope this helps!