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Hi David! Good topic. First of all, you should remove the modifiers from your business title on your Google+ Local page (and elsewhere). Google was briefly supporting these types of modifiers, but the most recent iteration of their guidelines states that this is not acceptable Location information, such as neighborhood, city, or street name, unless it is part of the real-world representation of the business. Your name must not include street address or direction information. Not acceptable: "Starbucks Downtown", "Macy’s Union Square", "Holiday Inn (I-93 at Exit 2)", "U.S. Bank ATM - 7th & Pike - Parking Garage Lobby near Elevator" Acceptable: "Starbucks", "Macy’s", "Holiday Inn Salem", "U.S. Bank ATM", "University of California Berkeley" So, do get rid of the modifiers. But ... I do not recommend linking both locations to the same page. If one is the corporate headquarters, then linking it to the homepage would be fine, but in a multi-location scenario, linking to a specific landing page of the website for each shop would be a more typical way to ensure that you are keeping your locations distinct and separate. And yes, the authority of these pages very likely does impact rankings. Be sure the first thing on these pages is the complete name, address and phone number of the specific location. Be sure you are creating good, unique content for each of the pages, too. The challenge you are up against with more than one business in the same city is that Google is unlikely to show more than one of the same business in a keyword search. A brand search is different. If someone just searches for 'Crescent City Vape', Google may well show both businesses in a 3 or 7 pack, but if the search is just for 'e-cigarettes in Crescent City' then Google is less likely to show any business more than once in a pack. So, where this leaves you then is pinning your hopes on the fact that Google is getting more and more sensitive to the user as the centroid of search - meaning that Google is likely to show users (especially mobile users) the location of your business that is physically closest to them at the time they make their search. So, a user searching from his cell while in Uptown will be more likely to see the Uptown location on his phone (and possibly his desktop) while if he goes over to the lower garden district, Google is likely to show him that shop instead. What this boils down to is that you need to optimize and promote both locations equally, and leave it up to Google to parse which user group gets shown which result. This is about as good as you can do. I would not make the locations part of the business name on the website - instead, I would include this in: The content of the page The description on your citations Blog posts Social outreach Menu links pointing to these pages on your website, as in 'Visit our Uptown Location', 'Visit our Lower Garden District Location'. Hope this helps!

Incredibly smart answer Miriam. I'm going to steal this line: "In general, inclusion of more than one result in a single pack for the same brand is the result of tremendous dominance or lack of competition." Miriam covered it all, I'll just say that things are somewhat different post-Pigeon. In the past it was very difficult to get more than one listing in the pack. But now with Pigeon I've seen packs where ALL 7 were for the same business. Example: one medical practice and 6 Drs at the same practice. That never used to happen before. And it's not really fair if there are 30 other businesses in that city that one locks everyone else out. But Pigeon has not settled in yet and it appears they are still testing and training it. So I would not count on that continuing and I've only seen it happen in some smaller less competitive markets. So all you can really do is follow Miriam's advice and continue working on all the best practice stuff you can. Consumers searching via phone that are located closer to location B will more likely see that one.

You lose some juice with a 301 and there is usually a 2 week period where you drop out of SERPs for that page. However, the rankings usually come back strong after that. A note about rewriting pages in general: I've rewritten old pages and seen improvements in SERPs. The risk would lie in how big of a content change occurs - if you have a page about dogs and rewrite for cats, you won't be rankings as well for dog terms. The benefit of rewriting over creating a new page is that it already has ranking power and can rank more easily for new terms. Since #2 is the one that is getting shared/linked to frequently now (and I'm assuming a better domain name), I would slowly redirect the pages from #1 to #2. Try it for a few pages and see what kind of results you get. Just give G 2 weeks to update your rankings. Cheers, Oleg Follow & Connect

Not knowing the nature of the blog, so mine is simply a "common sense" suggestion: would not be possible to schedule the posts with few days of anticipation respect the day of their previewed publication, so to to have them translated and so publish both the English and Spanish version at the same time? Or... isn't it possible for you to take care of the translation of the posts. Finally... if nothing of these solutions are possible, then I suggest you to put as canonical URL of the Spanish version the URL of the English one, at least until the translated version is not ready. Doing so you won't have any duplicate content issue.

Hi David, Thanks for clarifying this about the suite number. Interestingly, I've been seeing reports of 'suite' being changed to '#' in Places this morning. Sounds like your listing is being affected by what may be a widespread change in Google's handling of spelling/punctuation of suites. Thought you'd like to know that. The guidelines you are quoting: Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the hospital or clinic at large." To my understanding, your client does not fit this scenario. He is not a practitioner within a business. He is running a separate business than the other businesses at the same address. Now, if he were one of four partners at a legal firm, then, yes, each lawyer could have his own Place Page + the main Place Page for the firm itself. But, at least as far as I've understood, this is not your client's situation, right? I can see how you would arrive at the understanding that separate businesses at the same address would deserve the same treatment as partners within a single business, but in my experience, this is not how Google sees it. I have to stick by my original feeling on this - your client needs to have a unique suite number in order to avoid trouble down the road. I think your fears of future merging are appropriate. In your shoes, I would tell the client that they are going to have to set the record straight now, deal with the hassle of this, and hope to get things straightened out in the coming months with a great deal of elbow grease on your part. And, don't forget: the Google Places Help Forum is now staffed. You can always open a thread there in hopes of getting individual attention paid to your listing. Don't cross your fingers...but it is happening more and more these days. Hope my opinion is helpful to you on this. Miriam

Hi David, Nice to see you again! I want to be sure to link to a 2009 interview of Carter Maslan that covered this very topic. Though Carter's advice was meant to be taken as opinion rather than facts straight from Google, his remarks are really relevant to what you are asking about: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml This is the part of the interview I'm referencing: Eric Enge: Let’s say you have more than one location, 100 for example. In your view, is it helpful to have individual pages on the website for all of the locations? Also, is it helpful to have the Google local business center linked to each of those individual pages rather than having 100 locations that point to a single web address? Carter Maslan: I can tell you what I think the ideal end state is, and there are various levels of getting there. Ultimately, we would like to have the store-specific page known so that people can just click through and see today's specials and any kind of adjustments for that particular day. We would love to have all of that information on a direct click to the most specific page for that location. That’s what we encourage, but there are still a lot of chains and things that just link to their top-level domain. I guess it's a split answer. We want to get to a store specific page, but we are not uniformly there across all of the businesses. Eric Enge: Could that potentially be encouraged by making it a ranking factor, for example? Carter Maslan: Yes. I guess there are two sides to it. If you create a store-specific page that really just has an address, it wouldn't be as helpful as having some genuinely good content on the page that the user would really appreciate having as the first click-through experience. That’s what I think we need to work through. We don't want to arbitrarily tell people that they must create a store-specific page, because we are really just trying to find the most useful page for that business. That’s why I am not so definitive on the store-specific page or not. I really just want what’s best for the retailer, store or businesses, first and foremost giving the user what he would want to see when he clicks on that business. Eric Enge: Say you have a store-specific page that lists specific and individual things about just one store location. Depending on the kind of business that could be an inventory list that shows you've got extra stock? Carter Maslan: There is a chain of stores that carries yoga equipment that my wife really likes. They have special yoga instruction, carry special brands, and host lectures on some special days. There are all kinds of things that the retailer does that relate to that specific store location, and there is also a general corporate catalogue page. So this is not black and white, and even though we want to encourage it, it's not that there is a definitive guidance saying companies need to have that page. Eric Enge: Obviously it’s good if there is a quality page with information unique and specific to each location. Carter Maslan: Yes, that's great. If we know that there’s good information about that page, then that helps on search and the snippets that we can show on the search results, because we know that the page is referencing that place. It does help even if it ends up not being the page that you list as your primary homepage. If there is good content that we know is content about that place, then it helps us do a better job with query results. If a company has a page that's store-specific and talks about its class schedule, and there is one that says its holding Tai Chi class tonight and someone is searching for places to do Tai Chi, then that helps us to score it. If a lot of people have found that page helpful about the Tai Chi class, then when people search for Tai Chi we would know that that location has something to do with Tai Chi. In your shoes, my advice to this client would be this: Keep the basic contact information on the landing pages front and center. Put the complete NAP (name-address-phone number) first on the page in hCard. Follow this up with whatever the pitch is. Hire a good copywriter to write 3 -5 paragraphs of unique text for each of the 10 pages. Hire either a designer or video specialist to create a unique chart of statistics or a great video for each of the 10 locations. In addition to displaying this media, describe it in text. With these steps, the pages will be rich enough and different enough so that they don't simply come across as cut-and-paste jobs. Whatever is created should be specific to the town being targeted - whether this is a description of the location, the building, the office, crime statistics or what have you. Yes, this takes effort, but every website owner has decided to opt into the publishing business and this is their time to get publishing! Hope this helps! Miriam