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Greetings mozers,

One of my competitors and I both rank on the first page for our main keyword. They have 37k+ links, me only like 300 or so. My company actually has a business location though. This other site is just a listing of locations and they build sites for most of my competitors.

If I were able to get listed on their site, would that make me a stronger competitior with them?

And we would probably only get a brand term link from them but not a main keyword anchor text.

Will it be as effective to get the link from them if it's only for my brand name?

Thanks, Cy

I second competition with Expedia, hotels.com, tripadvisor... for small business

Thanks for your response Rafael,

I assumed as much.

I'll try to wait it out. If I directly loose dollars, can I send google a bill?

Or should I shut up and be happy Google doesn't send me one for all their free services?

Peace

Hey Nathan,

I have submitted the little form via google places ... however.

The main reason I had to claim again was because my location got hi-jacked by some other jerk. Which I didn't think was possible. I've had this location owned and verified for years, but not until google+ went hyper local places on me did the change occur. See Links...

http://cl.ly/02431a1x1J131E471d2a

http://cl.ly/2l2K2u0P0A1B2Y3i2q3E

So in trying to claim my listings again, I've gotten the verification pin in the mail, added it, but still no confirmation that I own the location

Is anyone else dealing with issues claiming a business location on Google places?

After already going through the process of claiming our business locations and verifying ownership. It seems that we have to do it again for google+ places.

I don't want to create a duplicate of the business, and i'm not sure If I should delete it from my places account, before trying to claim it again on google places.

Have you dealt with this issue, or is it new to you as well?

Craig,

From what I hear, each page should have 1 goal. So if you optimize each page for those one or two key terms then you should be good.

I would definitely include a "location" term within your keywords. Try different ways to mix it up...

"Web design Edinburgh" - "Edinburh Web designer" - "Web design in Edinburgh"

The difficulty comes when writing out your page copy without repeating yourself or saying "Web design Edinburgh" without it looking spammy.

Best of luck,

Cy

A hotel brand dominating serps?

Seems near impossible with all the clout OTA's have.

How do you guys pull it off?

Sweet! Glad to know I can eliminate an option.

I'll ask you the same thing I asked Thomas, will the query'd urls eventually drop off once google decides which version is best?

Thanks Saijo

Thanks for the info Thomas,

I only added the canonical tag about a month ago, do you think over time those query links will eventually die off?

Greetings,

The Hotel company where I'm employed uses query strings in it's url's to track customers.

The query strings are integrated into our property management system, and they help identify who we need to pay commissions to, so they aren't going anywhere.

While I understand that session variables could have been a better solution,  I sort of inherited this problem.

The issue I'm running into is that my Webmaster tools picks up these query strings as actual url's.

So for instance: www.url.com/index.php?P_SOURCE=WBFQ

Seems like a duplicate page of my root, and like wise for all my other pages that use our booking widget.

So, Is there a canonical solution to this issue? or would 301/302's be the only solution.

Also, we may have 10 different but specific query strings to put into our urls. Would the 301/302 approach cause any server issues for say 10 pages? So 10 pages x 10 access codes = a lot of redirects.

Thanks in advance,

Cyril