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According to Matt Cutts latest video about paid links everything that allows Page Rank to pass through is considered paid link and is against Google's rules. I think this is geared more towards directories but aren't 90% of press releases just another form of paid links? You pay to game the system, to manipulate the search engines. He goes on to say that if you "nofollow" the link there will be no penalty. It will be interesting to see how much their revenues will decrease if all press release websites & article distribution networks will have to nofollow their outbound links. He makes it very clear that paid ads are different because they do not manipulate search engines in any way.

What do you guys think?

Hello and sorry for the delayed response.

Bottom line: problem solved!

Thanks to the information you provided, we followed the article listed here: http://www.localseoguide.com/hey-seos-if-google-maps-calls-dont-answer/

then the one listed here:
http://www.localseoguide.com/the-non-place-place-use-case/

Andrew Shotland's case was similar with ours so we just followed through. Apparently the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" in Google Places account must be checked and then resubmit  your listing to Places Troubleshooter. It took about 15 minutes and our listing was back online as it was before. With small exceptions like West instead of W and Road instead of Rd. Weird thing is that even the "Do not show my business address..." is checked, on the listing you are still able to see the full address (not logged in).

This raises a few questions:

• Should we dare to edit our listing? What if we get back to the same problem?
• Can the "Road vs Rd" and "West vs W" affect us in rankings for Google Places?
• Could have been just a bug?

Thank you very much for your help, much appreciated!!

Does anybody know what is going on with this message? Instead of our Google Places page, we get the above message.

To be mentioned that Google representatives called our business to verify this listing 2 times this week...

Anybody got the same problem?

Thanks!

Hi Keri, as far as I could tell, it was a combination of things : template change, content change (more than 50%), Title change, new structure/layout of page, new elements/functions added...we basically changed the website. As far as the off site optimization is concerned, I don't think it had a major impact. Our link building was on track, a couple of annual paid directories expired but none of them was so important to have caused the drop, not even combined and I did not renew them. We are now pretty much were we were before the drop but we had a couple of big press releases that I think helped us too.

When editing my Bing business listing, I have noticed that they offer a free mobile website. I was actually looking to build one and I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for. I want to be able to customize it as well. Anybody tried it already?

arBS3.jpg

Thanks Simon,

"So long as that exact same real address is not shared with another business" Did you find that this is against Google's guidelines?

Hi Miriam (and all Local SEO mozers), I read a couple of your answers where you advice people in different situations not to consider a virtual office when creating their Google Places listing and I would like to know if you would apply the same advice in my case. This is the scenario: I have a client who's in the limousine service in Orlando, he just bought the URL and registered the business with the City using a "virtual office" in Orlando. This virtual office provides him a physical address, local area phone number, 411 listing, a listing for the businesses in that building and an office to have his meetings. This is the part where it gets confusing when I read your answers and I will give you an example. You said here:
 _The requirements in order to qualify for a Google Place Page are that you have: __1. A legal business name__2. A local area code phone number__3. A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you or from which your employees depart in order to serve customers at their locations (think chimney sweep, landscaper, etc.)_Number 3 says "A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you".
My client is going to rent one of those virtual offices, which does have a physical address, on as-needed basis. This office actually does exist. Why would Google have anything against it?
One of the reasons why he chose that location is because he is running the business from home and he does not want the clients to see it.
Another reason is the image he wants to create for his company by having a different address where he can hold meetings and such. The phone number will be either a local land-line or a local cell phone number, in any case, it will be a _local area code phone number. _
So this is where we stand: he dispatches the cars from home (he does not have a garage, the cars stay with the drivers 24 hours) but he meets his clients and business partners at the other address. There is nothing fake about it, he does have a legal business name, a local area code number and a real place where customers come to do business with.

Which address should I use for his Google Places listing?

Is anybody using Service Cloud from SalesForce? I just discovered I can do email marketing and in this edition, Facebook and Twitter is integrated. From my understanding it does the following:

• Track leads and deals, social sales - Track social conversations and engage

Can anyone tell me more about their own experience with SalesForce?

Thanks for your replies!

What about having a local an a 1800 number? Would that affect the local rankings too? About 2 -3 years ago, having a 1800 number listed meant that you are a trusted business not just a flight-by-night company with its cell phone as their main number.

Can anyone recommend all in one solution for cloud based email marketing and social media tools?

I am preparing an email marketing campaign and I would like to be able to monitor every email + the user interaction. This should be somehow connected to social media monitoring tool.. capturing new leads and so on... if anything like that exists...

Maybe MailChimp is the answer to my question but this one does not  monitor conversations around keywords and Radian6 is way too expensive. Any thoughts?

Thank you!

Thanks Robert!

Thanks, that's the plan

Are you saying you are not using "Likes" and "shares" at all?

_"Will lobbying take over SEO and SERP's? Just like Washington politics, will the bigger and deeper pockets wield the influence" . _

I'm not into politics, I'm just trying to rank my website.

Hi everybody!

We are planning to offer an incentive to all our customers who interact with us on social media websites. What's the most important thing to ask from a customer?

Facebook

• to like our Facebook business page or to like our own website through Facebook?
• to just follow us on Facebook or to actually comment / interact on our wall?

Google +

• to +1, share, add to circle our Google+ business webpage or to +1 or share our own website?

So basically what do we need to promote most? Our Facebook / Google+ business pages or our own website through social media marketing? While we understand it's important to actually interact with the customers and offer value on social media websites, we are looking to boost our SEO efforts.

Thank you!

I actually try them too for a while about a year of so ago but somehow I forgot about them.

Thanks for the quick reply!

After reading this blog entry from Dr Pete on Mirametrix, my question would be:
What's more important for a local company, being in the 7 pack or in the top 10 organic results? Which one attracts more clicks?

Is the optimization for local ranking just became more important than the traditional SEO?

Try to focus more on those competitors who don't have an exact match domain, it's much harder to rank when your URL does not contain at least a partial match. Google still puts a lot of weight on exact match domains. 
I would focus more on creating valuable content and post them on your site or use websites like Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon to get the word out. Put a snippet on those sites and the rest of the article on yours. In addition, if you can share it with minded-like people, such as through Facebook, I'm sure that will improve the results.

Try googling with industry-relevant keywords and advanced search operators to find sites that Google itself currently sees as authoritative, which are also publishing guest articles, then try submitting your articles to them if your website doesn't attract to many people.

Follow up question, what is more important, a "Like" or o comment on our Facebook page?
I'm trying to set up a social media campaign and I'm not sure what to ask people to do in return for a discount, what would be more beneficial.

Thanks!

Does anyone know what kind of app they have on their Facebook page and how to implement it? I think it is a great idea.

http://www.facebook.com/1800flowers

Thanks Miriam

For citations I used Whitespark probably more than a year ago, with little success, maybe they fine tuned it since then, I will give it a try again.

As far as the reviews are concerned, we are already doing that, following up with the customers and asking them to post their reviews online . We figured Google, Yahoo and Yelp will help us the most so these three are the only options the customers have to leave reviews although I must say, I was expecting a greater number of reviews. Do you have any resources where I can learn how to craft those emails about reviewing our services?

On the other hand, I am not sure if even with lots of real reviews and citations we will be able to penetrate the 7 pack due to reasons that I just discovered, reasons which I will explain in a new question once I finish reading all the material. In short is about how Google is ranking companies in Google Places and what is it doing to verify that the information those companies are providing (and which helps them rank so high) is accurate.