Do practitioner listings for the same business need to have different categories?

[TECHSEO35]

I'm trying to figure out an issue with practitioner listings, and I wanted to ask more about this because in this Q&A thread ( http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-businesses-at-the-same-address-avoiding-google-places-trouble ) it was stated that each listing needs to have a different category.

Sorry if this question is redundant, I just wanted to make sure I have a clear understanding before proceeding....

I'm managing local listings for a senior healthcare center that has 4 locations, and multiple practitioners at each location. I'm trying to figure out how to best handle the multiple practitioner listings, most of which appear to be scraped. I was going to claim, verify and begin managing them.

However, they all fall under the same category, "practitioner." What I've gathered from the response in the above Q&A thread is that I need to have a different category for each practitioner to please Google Places, despite the fact that "practitioner" is the best/most accurate category available in Google's pre-set categories.

Is my interpretation correct?

I'm confused because Google's guidelines say you can create a separate listing for each practitioner, which to me implies that it would be ok to use the practitioner category for each one. But then again, I want to make sure before proceeding.

Thanks,

Kim
#TECHSEO Account Manager

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Kim,

So glad you came here to ask this question.

Yes, it has been standard best practice to ascribe unique categories to each practitioner within a practice, however, things got really wacky with Google's new behavior towards businesses like doctors, dentists and lawyers. Let me link to some resources here that I think are must-read for anyone dealing with this type of business:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-duplicates-doctor-dentist-lawyer.html

Note in the above Google's announcement that they will no longer delete duplicate listings for doctors and the advice to mark them as 'permanently closed'. However, also note, that since Linda Buquet wrote the above post, Google changed the 'permanently closed' message so that it reads, "This Places Has Closed or Relocated". So that's a bit different.

Next, read this other post about Linda Buquet's experiment with managing to get a duplicate doctor listing removed:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search-general-discussions/861-dr-dupes-google-local-user-edits.html

I recommend you read the initial post and all follow-up posts on the above  thread.

These days, because of the issues with exactly this scenario, there is no way I would recommend that a new multi-partner practice set up a listing for each practitioner. I would simply set up a listing for each location and forget about listing the individual partners. Hope the materials I've linked to will help you understand the latest issues with this complex scenario.

[TECHSEO35]

Yes, these materials were very helpful and informative, thank you!

Another part of my issue was wondering how to handle scraped practitioner duplicates that were already in existence, but I was able to find a couple options on how to handle that in the resources you recommended.

Best!

Kim

[MiriamEllis]

So glad to be of help, Kim. Thanks for using Q&A!

[TECHSEO35]

One more thing I just thought of... Do these same rules apply to Yahoo and Bing local listings, or just Google?

Thanks again!

Kim

[TECHSEO35]

One more thing I just thought of... Do these same rules apply to Yahoo and Bing local listings, or just Google?

Thanks again!

Kim

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Kim,

So far as I know, neither Bing nor Yahoo has ever taken a public position on this subject. You could try live chat with Bing here to ask about it:

http://www.bing.com/businessportal

But, I have some doubts as to whether they will be able to quote you a rule on this. I've never seen one.

These are Yahoo's guidelines, but they make no mention of this factor:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ll/guidelines/local-01.html

Miriam