Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there! Yes, this would be the same issue, definitely. I'm sorry about any confusion there!

Adding to Roman's advice, which I agree with, be sure you've updated all of your government records so that the address reflects your business instead of the old one.

I would like to add, that I completely KW stuffing is not a good idea at all. Adding a city name will not really help you, adding a service type might. BUT, this is all very risky. Additionally, if you consistently are getting your name edited to what it reflects in the real world (As a TC I check the Secretary of State and the Street View) , there is a limit to the number of times a listing can be corrected before a suspension happens. In some cases, you may also end up with a hard suspension. (Especially if a TC gets involved.) Play by the rules, and make edits to competitors as Miriam suggested. Also, if you do the legwork report competitors that are using Virtual Offices/PO Boxes in the advertiser forums.

Always is pleasure to help : )

Hi there, Gaston's reply below is very helpful so I don't have too much to add apart from a couple of points. Personally, I think I'd disavow these links a bit at a time - perhaps submit a few of them to start off with and make sure there are no negative effects, then add more over time. Right now, no one really knows how Google handles disavow because on one hand, Google say they handle things automatically, but on the other hand they still provide the tool for us to use... 1. If you don't disavow now, just make sure you keep a note of all of these kinds of links (and watch for new ones in the future) and if you do experience any penalty problems, you have a list ready to go to submit. 2. If you do disavow now, take your time to get the list right and make sure you only disavow links which are purely manipulative and / or look spammy. If you haven't seen any traffic or penalty problems, you want to be extra careful when using disavow. At the same time, if links are clearly spammy, they're unlikely to help long-term anyway, so disavowing them may not hurt at all. I hope that helps! Paddy

Hi Kingalen I honestly would not use that French site as a model for your own. The homepage is just one big banner and you have to scroll below the fold to search anything, In my experience, the best home page for this type of site is one big search box in the middle with little opportunity to refine it until they get some results. You have to hook them in with the minimum of fuss. It's not the amount of text on the homepage but how relevant it is and quite frankly it just drones on about expiring leases and out of town businesses needing a rental. Keep it focused and succinct.Go to MOZ keyword explorer or any similar product and type in 'Office Space New York' and look down the most searched keywords. 'New York Office Lease' as well and write clean contextually strong copy for the home without overdoing it and trying to rank for every keyword you can think of. Then when a user has clicked on say, Bryant Park, show them the listings. Not just one or two at the top with a link to 'view all' and the rest of the page thick with content - Give them what they want as quickly as you can, and if then add some local area content with a map and image with alt saying 'Bryant Park'  below the listings. It seems to me that someone's attempts at novice SEO has ruined your site and you need to simplify and make the object satisfying your customers as quickly as possible rather than filling the site with cannibalising content and needless words. Of course, Meta is important for SEO so make sure that yours are optimised 'Bryant Park Office Space for Lease' you have 70 characters so. use them. Use one (1) H1 on the page! - for some reason your logo is an H1 - Use a logo with an Alt tag - 'Metro Manhattan Logo' Then the other H1 'Bryant Park Office Space' is OK, grab a photo of Bryant Park and Alt it 'Bryant Park Office Space' and use just 3-500 words per page and you will be fine. I hope that helps. Regards Nigel Regards Nigel

Hi Kingalan1 I think this post if for you A Step-by-Step Guide to Updating Your Website Without Destroying Your SEO

I am not that good with Javascript so I can't really comment on that part. I do understand that there can be many legitimate reasons to show people content that is relevant to users based on their location. I think it can be very useful and actually improve the user experience of the people that visit your site. I think it is worth a try and then just monitor the results. Maybe even do some A/B testing with different content to see which is the most productive and provides the best user experience.

Yeh, I thought you'd like it. I have been working with a lighting eCommerce store and we have been looking at them a lot - they nail it with SEO Regards Nigel

1.) If the business is brand new, and there is no record of it on the Internet as of yet, then I would only recommend creating practitioner listings if it is necessary to point out an area of specialization. So, for example if a medical practice has 5 MDs, the listing for the practice covers that, with no added listings needed. But, if a medical practice has 5 MDs and an Otolaryngologist, it may be good marketing to give the specialist his own listing, because it has its own GMB category and won’t be competing with the practice for rankings. *However, read on to understand the challenges being undertaken any time a multi-practitioner listing is created 2.) If the multi-practitioner business is not new, chances are very good that there are listings out there for present, past, and even deceased practitioners. If a partner is current, be sure you point his listing at a landing page on the practice’s website, instead of at the homepage, see if you can differentiate categories, and do your utmost to optimize the practice’s own listing — the point here is to prevent practitioners from outranking the practice. What do I mean by optimization? Be sure the practice’s GMB listing is fully filled out, you’ve got amazing photos, you’re actively earning and responding to reviews, you’re publishing a Google Post at least once a week, and your citations across the web are consistent. These things should all strengthen the listing for the practice. If a partner is no longer with the practice, it’s ideal to unverify the listing and ask Google to market it as moved to the practice — not to the practitioner’s new location. Sound goofy? Read Joy Hawkins’ smart explanation of this convoluted issue. If, sadly, a practitioner has passed away, contact Google to show them an obituary so that the listing can be removed. If a listing represents what is actually a solo practitioner (instead of a partner in a multi-practitioner business model) and his GMB listing is now competing with the listing for his business, you can ask Google to merge the two listings. Source Not-Actually-the-Best Local SEO Practices IF THIS ANSWER WERE USEFUL MARK IT AS A GOOD ANSWER

Hi Donald, Thanks so much for the answers. Other than a past SEO doing this for some weird reason for your client, the only other explanation I can think of is that the weird listings are the outcome of some kind of aggregation by the directories in question. Some directories do auto-generate listings, and there is a possibility of your client's business getting mixed up with the details of some other business. But I'm not really leaning that way because of the fictitious address. That "feels like" spam to me. But, I definitely would review this with the client in full to see if anything about it rings a bell to them about past work that may have been done internally or by an agency. I think the best thing to do here would be to discover as many directories as you can that are listing the fictitious business and contact them to request listing removal, as you've done with Manta. You will easily be able to approve that the address is non-existent, that the phone doesn't connect to anything, and, if you've received no reply trying to use the email address, that the email is unresponsive. Show legal proofs of ownership of the brand name if necessary. Then, once you've gotten these odd listings removed, I would make it a practice once a month to search for any new listings that may crop up. Not very fun, but it seems necessary in the instance of such an odd scenario. Good luck!

Hey Lee, Dave from the Help Team here. Site Crawl will detect any error that we report on, for any page that is accessible to the crawler.  As you develop and change your website, new crawl issues might get detected as well.  Hopefully that helps to clarify, if you need us to look into specific examples, feel free to email help@moz.com.

Thanks !

None of them. but the website is generated by angular js.

Hi, You probably want to start reading this: https://moz.com/blog/seo-split-testing-a-b-test-changes-google, it's a great post by Will Critchlow explaining what you should be thinking about if you really want to set up valid SEO experiments. I would always advise to run your SEO and UX experiments separately. You analyze them different, you bucket in a different way and the changes that you make for SEO don't always have to influence UX. Hopefully this will get you going. Let me know if you have more questions. Martijn.

Your dev is right on the specific question of whether the additional GMB profiles are necessary for Google to understand which is the primary version. This is not essential as long as the proper redirects are in place. It's a "belt and suspenders" approach. If there's no way for the search engine crawlers to ever reach anythig but the primary version, then there's no way for them to get it wrong. You're using the GMB info to reinforce what the redirects are already doing. (That said - it's trivial to reinforce the redirect process with the declaration in GMB, so best practice is to do that as well. You need the GMB profile to properly manage the other aspects of marketing the site anyway, so...) Put another way - declaring the primary version of the site using the alternate GMB profiles is Google's way of allowing those who might not have proper dev access to sites to at least partly accomplish the same thing from within GMB which they can manage. The real value to verifying the other versions in GMB is so that you can monitor to make certain that those non-canonical versions of the site are in fact definitely not getting indexed or ranked. This is essential after an HTTPS migration, for example, as you should see the HTTP profile showing a steady drop in indexing while the HTTPS profile shows the steady increase. A periodic check of the non-canonical GMB profiles will alert you immediately to any newly discovered issues Google's crawlers may be encountering (like a sitewide redirect got accidentally removed or changed, for example.) Make sense? Paul

Hey hey, Paul - you read my article! Woo hoo Thank you. And thanks for your great contributions to this thread.

Have you seen any further improvement on the indexing front, Cat? Paul

Hi Sam Sale pages are always a problem in ECommerce stores. At the very least, during Sale periods their content can be identical to a category or brand and that can cause problems with duplication. There are a few ways of overcoming this: 1. Canonicalise all Sale pages back to the preferred brand or category - that way they do not show up independently in search and don't interfere with the ranking of your major pages. 2. Call it clearance and don't mention the word 'sale' at all - It can be your promotions, discounts, end of season clearance page - keep the term 'sale' on the main brand or category and provide a link to the 'clearance page. Make sure you write 3-500 words on each page to support this strategy and everything will be peachy! Regards Nigel