Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ah, good to know we've narrowed this down together! For another reporting method, I'd tweet GMB @__GoogleMyBiz__ and link to your GMB forum post. If you do succeed in getting Google to edit the spammed names, I would love to hear what you see happen in the local pack after that. It may/may not affect rankings, so your experience would be educational to our community if you can share it. It's been a pleasure chatting with you about this.

First I think it will take time for Google to completely disassociate the old domain from the new domain. With that being said have you tried to disavow all the spammy backlinks on the old domain? You could also meta no index the entire site and get it You could also either meta no index the entire site and get it de index from Google or block it from being crawled within its robots.txt file. That is probably the closest you could come to deleting the domain. I hope that helps some.

Is this a manual action that you can see in Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions? It sounds like you're saying that this isn't a manual action, but rather, the site was not ranking well and then when you implemented https it recovered to high rankings and then shortly after it resumed ranking poorly. There are many different filters and algorithms that Google uses to determine quality. When a site switches to https, the URLs are different and I do think it's possible that some of the dampening filters (such as Panda for example) could lift off. However, as Google recrawls the site and assesses it in the eyes of these algorithms, then whatever quality problems were there previously would eventually surface again. To me though, this situation is exciting because this really does seem like evidence that the site is being suppressed. Often it's hard to tell whether there is suppression present or whether the site simply doesn't deserve to rank well. It sounds like there are some issues that still need to be addressed.

Thanks, yeah I'm pretty sure national SEO is just to work on organic, but never hurts to ask and be 100% sure. I've already asked one way, a while back, but really boils down to since we don't have physical locations and those drop shipping places are just affiliate services we can access, doesn't warrant the same local search options as say a Burger King or Walmart having those national physical listings. Thanks anyways

I agree with Eric, and I also think this may be a good use for UTM tracking URLs. You could easily set them up using, say, the video titles as your utm_content. You could then shorten the URLs with the UTM parameters. Google has a great URL builder tool here.

I should add - I have probably read more Whiteboard Fridays than I have actually watched, just because I find it easier to speed read through it and hone in on the stuff I care about. Something to consider since not all of your visitors want to watch a video - some people don't have speakers/headphones, don't want to use mobile data, etc.

Thanks guys! I didn't think it would make a difference, but wanted to get another point of view. I appreciate it!

Thanks so much for saying so, Tom, and glad to hear you're feeling better. I don't travel much, so I don't have anything scheduled, but thanks for asking. Have a good weekend!

MGordon, This is patently untrue. We have clients who change locations and we do not change the website/content/etc. Yes, you need to make sure the NAP is clean for the new location, and make sure the website has the new info and not the old, but there is no other website change needed. Best

No, you cannot edit Avvo answers.   I suppose you can ask the folks at Avvo to just remove all of client's answers. No idea whether they will do it for you. I have had them remove an answer or three for me, so it can't hurt to ask.  Not sure how your client will feel about you doing that, of course.

Hello Miriam, Thank you for your feedback.  I was not aware of item number one and I'll look into it.  In the meantime I'm trying to get an understanding of the factors which can replicate the effect of "custom categories" for new clients who I don't have the old Google Places interface for and could really use the effect of custom categories. As to your point on number three; I have done some testing and from what I can tell there is little or no value from the description field (probably because it would be too easy to spam). I do see some competitors ranking with the new Google Plus Business accounts even against others that have categories so I think there has to be a way to do it... I just don't know how. Thanks

The ultimate truth here is much more important a consideration than which version you go with.  IF you intend to build a highly trusted site with highly trusted off-site signals, and truly unique content that's highly focused and deep enough, either domain variation will work just fine. If you are stuck on the belief that an exact match or exact match variations are a golden ticket, you are just as likely to see the site suffer Google's recent Exact Match Domain (EMD) devaluation regardless of the domain you choose, because no matter what, SEO best practices need to be implemented. I will, however, agree with James in regard to the "perceived" value of a ".com" domain vs. a ".net" domain as well. There is a certain value in a ".com" from a user perspective in general, and that needs to be considered.

Just in case anyone else has this question or comes across this hopefully it will help them... Using the entire review content from 3rd party site on your site even is you are using schema mark up will be considered duplicate content. Thank you to Brian U. over at Webmaster Central

Yes, I've seen that happen as well, but this is stranger.  I'm in Houston and can check the listings "even when including Phoenix in the keyword" and its fine.  I can move my location (on google) to any other city and the listings are all the same and good.  But as soon as I put it on Phoenix, the listings are killed.  I've just never seen this and have no idea whats going on...