Investigating Google's treatment of different pages on our site - canonicals, addresses, and more.

[AtticusBerg1]

Hey all -

I hesitate to ask this question, but have spent weeks trying to figure it out to no avail. We are a real estate company and many of our building pages do not show up for a given address.

I first thought maybe google did not like us, but we show up well for certain keywords 3rd for Houston office space and dallas office space, etc. We have decent DA and inbound links, but for some reason we do not show up for addresses.

An example, 44 Wall St or 44 Wall St office space, we are no where to be found. Our title and description should allow us to easily picked up, but after scrolling through 15 pages (with a ton of non relevant results), we do not show up. This happens quite a bit. I have checked we are being crawled by looking at 44 Wall St TheSquareFoot and checking the cause. We have individual listing pages (with the same titles and descriptions) inside the buildings, but use canonical tags to let google know that these are related and want the building pages to be dominant. I have worked though quite a few tests and can not come up with a reason. If we were just page 7 and never moved it would be one thing, but since we do not show up at all, it almost seems like google is punishing us. My hope is there is one thing that we are doing wrong that is easily fixed. I realize in an ideal world we would have shorter URLs and other nits and nats, but this feels like something that would help us go from page 3 to page 1, not prevent us from ranking at all.

Any thoughts or helpful comments would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10005/lower-manhattan/44-wall-st/44-wall-street

We do show up one page 1 for this building - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10036/midtown/1501-broadway, but is the exception. I have tried investigating any differences, but am quite baffled.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Atticus,

Just want to clarify that you are not seeking actual local rankings for this, as rental buildings are considered ineligible business models per Google's Local Business Information Guidelines which read:

Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible to be listed on Google Maps and should not be verified. Instead, verify the business information for your sales or leasing office or offices. If you have a property with an on-site office, you may verify that office location.

So, if Local is out due to the business model, then this becomes a purely organic puzzle. Google's treatment of a query like '44 Wall St' is going to be varied, due to the lack of specificity of such a query. They are not sure why you are looking for this address and the results I see consist of a variety of answers on Google's part including Mapquest results, some attorneys that work there, some rental offices, etc. In other words, the results are a hodgepodge.

"44 Wall St office space" is a much clearer query, in terms of its intent. Competition looks extremely stiff for this, and searching from California, I see you coming up on page 3 of Google's organic results. Moving up in a situation like that is likely going to result from the typical organic factors (authority, age, activity, freshness, etc.) If you're not duplicating content or building bad links, then it's probably not a penalty - just a competitive environment.

I'm hoping you'll receive further feedback from the community on this!