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Hi David! Please check out the tutorial in this recent Moz blog post of mine, which I believe will outline the options in your scenario: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing If any question remain after reading that, please definitely let me know!

Can you share the listing? I can provide some feedback with the NAP. Also, did it used to rank?

Hi David! I think this might be the answer to what you're seeing: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-titles-and-descriptions-2016/163812/ Does that seem right?

One more question, what about longer meta descriptions> I noticed find law and a lot of others allow longer metas to show in their search results in Google

That is good advice, thank you. I would still want to hear from a few more people just so we have a variety of opinions. It's a big and expensive switch, so all advice is helpful.

Thank you for your response. It appears the best way to go about this is to make the main site amazing and optimize it around what they sell, correct? This is what I had in mind, but just wanted to check with the community to be sure.

1. He is the main lawyer at his new practice, but he also has one other. 2. We do not have access to the old listing. We contacted Google and they were able to tell us that the listing is owned by his old partner's email address (yikes!). They didn't exactly split on good terms, so I am hoping that Google will be able to release the listing so we can claim it. Once we are able to claim, should we just delete it entirely? Would this action remove it from Google maps completely, or just mark it as closed?

Hey David! I like your thinking on that, but from what I have seen, the top 10 results for most established businesses tend to contain all kinds of different things in the description portion of the SERP entry. For example, one will have part of a user review, another will have hours, another will have part of the owner's description. Take a look at some SERPs and you''ll likely see this. Again, not trying to discourage anyone from writing unique descriptions - just saying that the ROI on doing so may not be great, given the way that descriptions are going to be duplicated downstream + the fact that you will not control what information ends up in the SERP display description field for most 3rd party mentions of your business.

Thanks for the reply. The files are not blocked, just highly compressed (and some are set to cache). I wonder if they are getting confused when trying to read the files...

We are not using Wordpress for any of the tools, and all will be handled using PHP. This is a separate directory from our main site used strictly for the tools. Our main site does not use Wordpress either. The server resources are not an issue at this time, as we have a very powerful setup. I am not worried about how many times a subscribed user wants to ping their site. I am more concerned about where the ping is being sent out from and how many times.

I saw this and thought it might be related: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-fluctuations-continue-likely-not-penguin-21489.html

"We did this to let people know that we come out to their location, and also to try to expand our reach. For example, if you were searching for an SEO company in Chesterfield, that is an area that is about 30 mins from us. I'm not sure our local office listing would "carry" that far out, and thus the service area was created as a test." Service area and service radius have absolutely no impact on ranking. It's been tested, proven. Typically you'll only rank in the city your are in. Unless competition is low and you are very strong, then sometimes you'll rank in other cities, but service area settings don't play a part. "I'm not sure that the bot would take that long to recrawl the listing, and I would have thought that it would have happened by now if that was the case." Sorry, not talking regular bots, like the ones that crawl sites. Maybe bot is the wrong word. But with Local listings you can have a violation for years without an issue. Then you make a minor edit and it seems to trigger a recheck of the listing to see if it stands up to current guidelines, then it gets wacked. You had another question I got via email but it's not showing up here so copying: "I had a question about this, as even though we had quite a few mentions of the city and service they were spread out throughout the description and not bulked together in the traditional definition of keyword-stuffing. If what you were saying about the description having no part to play is true, how would that have had an impact on the LBL drop? Help me understand, my mind is a sponge right now ;)" Description is not a RANKING factor. But the algo looks at it as a signal of spamminess. Spammers have lots of patterns that the algo can pick up on, this is one of them. So a non-spammy description can trip a filter if it follows the same pattern of overly repetitious keywords. In that short description, count every single time any word is repeated more than once. I did a quick scan and counted 25. Mike Blumenthal has also said mentioning city even twice in description can cause a 10 point ranking penalty. I have examples I could show at my forum, where the description was not spammy or KW stuffed, but the city and KWs were repeated multiple times. They clean up description per my recommendation and pop right back up. But again all that was pre-pigeon. After, it seemed like lots of really spammy ones were getting away with it. So may no longer be an issue. But like I said above, if it does not help and if customers will never see it and if it could maybe hurt AND if your ranking was suffering, why not clean it up? Nothing to lose.

It is pointing to the other server now. We have it blocked from indexing on that end, just wanted to make sure that was enough.

As far as the AdWords accounts go, you should choose the account that is performing the best and copy everything over through AdWords Editor. Before copying everything over, you will need to have one merchant center upload that has all of the products first then it's easier to move everything to the best performing account. I don't think there is any way for your Google Rep to be able to promise a transfer of history, so the account may take 4-6 months to return to a similar performance level. I think that managing all of these products in one place from an advertising perspective is significantly easier than running them all through a bid management system. and it's likely right now that they may be trying to compete against each other and drive up costs.

What you have produced has a fantastic appearance.  What isn't obvious to me when I land on this page are.... **1) Who Should Care?  ** Tell visitors who will constitute your audience? ...who should read your stuff?   is it experienced SEO, small biz owner, somebody new to SEO who wants to know what an experienced person like you thinks they should know about and what they should be reading. If you intend to use this page as a way to keep clients and potential clients up-to-date with changes in search and internet marketing (or whatever subject) then stating that very clearly at the top - even as the big bold text at the top of the page, then I think you would get a better following. 2) Your commitment and a way to subscribe. The people who visit my page have the opportunity to sign up to receive it by email or rss feed through FeedBurner.   I have a very obvious announcement there... GET OUR UPDATES FIVE TIMES PER WEEK.  That's my commitment.  They can see each daily post has a date at the top and six to ten entries and maybe a video.   They see I am running an active daily service. Over ten years I have accumulated thousands of subscribers because they know I am going to feed them the news. About 1/2 subscribe by RSS and about 1/2 by email.  When I mention an article in my news the website with the content can get hundreds to a thousand visitors immediately.  It is a great way to launch my own content. **3) Who you are gonna be. ** In the blurb that you use with each entry you can step into a pulpit and show your voice.  You can give  guidance.  "Every small biz person competing for organic traffic should read this."...... "Remarketing is a way to give repeated calls to action for the folks who have visited your website.".....  "Don't make this mistake on your blog".... etc.     "Lots of people are doing this but it sets off my BS meter" You can be the guy to recommend, diss, endorse, suggest.  If you assume that role, I think that it might help build a following.

I don't have any problem linking out if I know the site that I am linking to really really well.  I don't see anything wrong with your list of "SEO and Marketing Resources" if you want to recommend them to your clients. I am assuming that you would like to have content on your website that educates your visitors and showcases your expertise.  If that is the goal, I would be concerned about finding articles other website and using them as the basis of a short article on my site.  All that does is turn your website into a signpost that promotes other people. I would rather spend a little extra time per article and write a library of articles on my own site that explain mostly evergreen topics.  Why?  If these resources are being prepared as a knowledge base for current and potential clients then I would want to keep them on information that I produce and control than send them out to other websites where my branding and expertise is lost. Using articles on other websites might seem like a time-saving effort that saves you from explaining the nitty-gritty - you just link to it.  But it doesn't have the same impact as explaining the nitty gritty on your own site and keeping your voice and your branding in the visitors mind. What happens when the other website deletes that article or goes out of business or starts publishing stuff that you don't agree with?  This is going to happen eventually.  Then all of the work that you put into that article is gone. Also, this isn't going to earn you likes, links, tweets and mentions.  It is going to earn those things for the other guy.  You are simply turning your website and your labor into an advertising effort for other people in your industry. Why not build a resource for yourself?  Write a weekly or monthly original stand-alone, evergreen article service that people can subscribe to, tweet about, mention, link to and like. That is how I would approach this.

It can do - as others have said, there is a lot you can get away with with brilliant results if you manage to go undetected, and the linking pages' metrics are good enough to fool search engines about their quality. Spam still ranks - "churn and burn" link development (where you cycle through throw-away domains, ranking one for a short period for a highly-profitable keyword, putting a new site in its place when it is penalised / banned) still legitimately works too, but is obviously not most people's idea of a great long-term business plan if they have any desire to build a brand or use their online brands offline. But if you rank top-three for [buy cialis] for two weeks with a domain you spend $9 on and link development you can spin easily for new sites, you will come away with a healthy profit. Not saying this is what your competitor is doing, and engaging in outright spam is a bad idea if you don't plan to ditch domain after domain, but it can absolutely still work if quick rankings are all you care about.

Hi everyone We have read through all these comments, but still not sure what to do about this. We do church web design, and our link would be on church websites. That seems relevant to me. These responses go back to 2014. Is there any current advice or information on this topic? Thanks:-)