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Hi Dignan, The appropriate thing to do in cases like these it to go through the REPORT A PROBLEM link at the bottom of each problematic Place Page. It's a good idea to be signed into your account while doing this. Describe the situation and link to the correct listing for your business in the wizard. State that you have only one address - the one on your authoritative listing. Ask that these 2 other listings be removed. Wait 4-6 weeks to hear back from Google (could take considerably less time these days, actually). If you do not see resolution, then take the matter to the new Google Places Help Forum. The new forum will be here: http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/maps Explain the steps you have taken and ask if a Top Contributor can please help you obtain resolution. *In your shoes, I would also do some sleuthing to try to figure out where the other data is coming from...it's coming from somewhere and discovering the origin may help you to surmise what is going on. Hope this helps and good luck! Miriam

From what i have read Google wants their crawler and end users to see the same content and have the same experience. Based on that, if you have a header image that says "Great Deals" and you want search engines to read that, simply place that content in your ALT tag (SEOMoz has even posted studies showing that the ALT tag holds more relevance than the in regards to keyword placement). So my question to you is why would you need the to be their in the first place?

Can you offer an example of a couple URLs in your current structure, along with what you plan for your new structure? Regarding the errors, do you have them now? Or do you believe the change will cause errors?

Major No-No. Most likely they will eventually be found out and knocked down. It is painful to wait for that day to occur, I know. Just write more and better content

Yah it says it right here.  Thanks.  I must've missed it when I was reading it earlier: You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the office.

Depends what you are trying to accomplish. I'd venture to guess the ones that are going to give you value while maintaining nofollow links are going to be the more popular ones like everyone has listed here. If you're just looking to build links that pass regular value then you're going to want go after the more obscure ones. Not sure how up to date this list is but here's a page that lists the social media and social bookmarking sites with DoFollow links: http://www.techiemania.com/list-of-65-dofollow-social-bookmarking-sites.html

Thank you for clarifying and sharing your knowledge.  I think it is easy to get stuck in a link building rut with little variance when working on local, so this will very much help.

Speculating about the next couple years of SEO is one thing. The further out you go, the more variables you introduce and the less relevant the ideas become. A few years ago most people could not predict the impact twitter and facebook would have on SEO. Many still don't understand and need to be awoken with clear visual charts. I am not willing to speculate further then what I have, but I will watch your question and hope it spurs other ideas.

I believe that if Website A links to Website B and at the same time Website B links to Website A that the links can still be valuable.  Great websites link to other great websites all of the time.  I don't think that Google will discriminate against those links unless....... A) the websites are entirely unrelated to one another (about very different topics B) the links are in a dumb location such as on a "link exchange" page or footer C) the links are highly optimized anchor text So, as long as the links are placed in a context that is valuable for the visitor these links still have a chance to carry value. As for guest blog posting... if you have a local history site in the United States and guest blog on a site about hydraulic jacks in Germany then I think you are wasting your time.  But if both of these sites are about the local history of the same area then, in my opinion, these webmasters could very legitimately be colleagues who refer to each others work and enthusiastically share ideas with one another's visitors.