Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Guys, I think I just wanted validation that I'm doing the right thing.

This is my biggest client yet and my paranoia about damaging their London Google Place page has gone through the roof :D.  Ho Hum.

Thanks, I think you are agreeing with my course of action of having one brand page and a verified page for each location?

It is 1 company - it is a nationally recognised brand - but each city/town will have it's own page.  Is that what you recommend Francisco?

(just double double checking)

Hi All

I'm looking for a bit of a steer on which direction to go in here.

I have a new client and the client has a 'branch' in London.  The brand is about to be franchised across the UK.  They currently have a google places page in London (old style Google places, not a plus page) and nothing else on Google +.

I don't really want to touch the Google place (local page) because it ranks well for their business and far higher than their organic search result.

In terms of adding to their social presence, I think a Google Plus 'Brand' page would work as a generic brand, with several additional local pages being created as franchisees come on board.  They have a safe and strong brand and have plans to reinforce through social.

I'm about to set up the brand page and wondered if anyone has any thoughts, words of warning or points to consider?

I don't know why but I feel somewhat tetchy and fearful of Google places that have yet to be merged.

Thanks

Thanks all for your help, I was de-blacklisted this afternoon - phew.

I didn't check the dates  The site is less than a month old though.

When you say logs, I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for.  I use cpanel so have access to various logs, but I have to admit, I haven't spent any time in there and now I'm conscious that this is something I need to educate myself on quick.

Any suggested resources for which logs to use for what?

Thanks, I'm not so sure!  I'm a freelancer and I wok on my own so I have nobody to really bounce ideas off, so this community is great for that.  Glad to know I'm doing it right

I'm not a bit lover of plugins and I try to keep to a minimum, but I've removed anything unessential - even my beloved Flare sharing buttons, for now anyway.

I'll let you know when Google come back to me

Thanks all for your responses, much appreciated.

I installed the timthumb vulnerability scanner and it says no instances were found.

I'm going to go through and ditch the unnecessary plugins...I use woocommerce and they have  recent upgrade but its not compatible with my theme so I can't update it, which is a giant pain.  I hope its not that.

Thanks for your help.

Good morning.

Just done my WMT ritual morning check and one of my sites has been blacklisted for malware.

It's a wordpress site - I've run various scans, e.g. http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and also installed wordfence and scanned with that and wordfence produced some offending files which I have now deleted.

I've also installed website defender in the hope that it wont happen again.  I'm pretty good with staying on top of updates and rarely let a few days pass without upgrading new version of wordpress or plugins etc.  I've also checked my users to make sure no new admins or anything and also changes passwords.

I've asked for a review from Google and just wondered how long these reviews take?

Also, has anybody got any advice, is there anything else I should be doing?

Thanks

Tyr this post too...

How to add an image to google images

Hello

The answers to those 3 problems come bac to the strategic decision on whether to have one page and build as a brand, or to have 4 pages and build as a local brand.

1.  If you have four pages you will need to update all four..I think there are ways of automating, but none of the automated G+ content I've seen looks any good - I think I've only seen people able to send their tweets (and they look as wrong there as they do on facebook).  Bufferapp is working on adding G+, but in the meantime, if you are looking to build locally, I would keep the four pages and update them all manually, individually and tailored to your local audience.

2. If you have a user circling one, you would hope or expect that it's because they are attracted to the local page and they are circling as it is locally relevant and interesting to them.  e..g if they live in halifax and circle halifax, then thats fine.  The bradford page should be of no great importance to them.

3.  Google places for business technically doesn't exist anymore.  They were replaced by Google+ Local pages.

whoops, I didn't spot that, I just saw the example and didnt read the finer details!

hmmm....I'd want a more indepth conversation with your developer, because that doesn;t make a lot of sense.

You can get loops but that happens when the redirect has been incorrectly set up, or you have a really long convoluted chain of hops..  (I have done this myself personally and got in a couple of knots).

At the end of the day, you need to be able to reasonably rewrite your urls and it is your developers job to facilitate that and do whatever is technically necessary.  You might need to look back at the history of what you've got redirecting where to prevent it going haywire.

Hi

Technically there are two pages - the old one and the new one.  That's the way Google will see it.  You need to point the old page at the new page with a 301 redirect in the htaccess file.

Are you using wordpress?  You can get an easy plugin called 'redirection'

Here are the SEOMoz best practises around redirecting.

By the way, are you in Hudds?  I'm just over the hill in Elland!

I had noticed too, but I'm normally on my laptop when I'm on here so it's not an issue for me...I just assumed that they're working on it (among other stuff!).

In all honesty I've never done any serious testing but I've always worked by a rule of thumb of 5 to 15 words max, with the keyword as close to the front as I can get it..

I think that would be fine to set up.  As long as you have four distinct adresses for each shop I would have a place for each.

Just using the example of Clinton Cards in the UK, a high street chain of Greeting card shops.  They have dozens of shops throughout the UK in probably every town.  I just did a search for

Halifax Card Shops

Bradford Card shops

For both of these, two totally separate google place listings exist for Clinton cards, as local businesses.  They are maybe 15km apart.

It depends on what you are wanting to achieve with it.  I you were looking to rank in local search I would definitely be setting up a page per store, with the location in the title, such as 'Store Name' + 'Location'.

If people are searching for specific products in one of these towns you could optimise each google place/page.

If it was more about online and national/international brand awareness then I'd have just the one page and give it all the focus.

Can you post the url?

Yep, definitely looks like a case of keyword stuffing.  You'll need to go back to the drawing board and rewrite the content for that page (at least).

I'd suggest using the On Page Optimisation tool here.  I just ran it for you and it graded it an A but there are a lot of areas that still need fixing, primarily keyword stuffing related and also it looks like you might have too many onpage links.

Do all the suggestions there first and then resubmit the page and see if that helps.  I haven't looked at your link profile - have you had any warnings in WMT?

Thanks for the really helpful response, I'll do that and talk to the client about the domain change. Much appreciated.