Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Keri, 
This is why I always have thought you were a rock!!! You are still my hero.

Most of us deal with UI/UX questions and SEO questions from clients on a daily basis. I was discussing video length with a client recently and I realized that he was in his video. This made me think about the thrill of seeing yourself in video might cause someone to make their video longer at the expense of UX. So, I thought I would put it to the Moz community. If a company is doing a "typical" home page "Explainer" video that tells about a company. This can be in the B2B or B2C sectors. I want to withhold my opinion at this point for the discussion.

As Antonio says, you do not want to affect your ability to have people login. His answer is well thought out.

Antonio,

Really nice answer here.

If you read above you will see that it has been removed.

This is what many are using instead: http://isearchfrom.com/

Yes, you were right. Good job.

I'm not sure from Linda's post that you can draw the conclusion Google is most likely removing it. Here is the quote from Linda:

"Google is testing or tweaking or moving or deleting the option to set search location. 
Obviously this feature/ability is critical to those of us in the industry. "

Our Local guy is on Linda's forum regularly and said no one is sure if it is a change, a bug, or a tweak. Yes, it is easy to believe they are removing it based on past behavior, but not sure that is necessarily true. Thanks for the input  and the link to Linda's post though.

Thanks, I think it just adds more info. Seems to be a bug at the Google. OR if you are more into the conspiracy realm, it is some surreptitious way of tracking where we think we may want to be if we lose our memory on a day we are logged in....

Best

I was checking on a client ranking and went to Incognito in Chrome for the search. I went to search settings to set the location and thought I had done something wrong. I closed and went back to search settings and still no location setting. See attached.

Interestingly, when I went to my signed in Chrome and set the location and then went to incognito and went to search settings, then location showed up for me. This also begs a question about why Google has this where you must be signed in to set a location in Incognito mode.

Thanks for any input you have,

Robert

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Miriam,

Thanks for these links; they are quite helpful!

Alick,

I did use the Adwords community forum and was pleasantly surprised by the input. One person (level 13) stated this had happened to him and gave some good input. Another did as well. Thanks for taking time to send an answer to me.

All the best,

Robert

Our UK office was able to reach the associate adwords strategist's boss finally via phone. He apologized and said it was a mistake, etc. He has agreed to ensure the clients are aware that they work only with agencies and they should not have been contacted, etc. I have to say that once we were able to reach someone it did get handled. But, IMO it does not change the behavior so... wait and see.

The good news is that we believe for our accounts we have a new contact with Google who is feeling he needs to give us a bit more effort due to the issues with our two clients. I will guardedly say... "All is well that ends well."

Alick,

Thanks for the Google community suggestion, I hate to waste the time there but will give it a try.

I have been dealing with Google and Adwords for ten years and the email is from Google and the person is _____@Google.com, an Assoc. Account Strategist. AKA junior sales fellow that started there last week (IMO). This has devolved now as the guy sent me an email stating: "It was a mapping issue on our end since there are two primary MCCs linked to the account and previous strategists have worked directly with the end client. It is now updated."

Interestingly, the client has not used Adwords before so we are not quite sure how they can make this statement. BUT, in his response to me he goes on to state he has also contacted another client from our MCC!!!

Edit:(Which would seem to say you were trolling through our MCC.)

And therein lies the problem. I have never been one to knock Google like so many do. I understand they have a business and we and others choose to play on their playground. But, when you go out and make a big display about your desire to Partner with Agencies, etc. and then you turn around and destroy that trust, your hubris is going to cost you. I realize they could care less about our account or us as an agency in terms of a single 6 figure client is literally less valuable than a nickel in my pocket. It is just sad that they once based everything on do no evil. I was truly shocked by the email to our client.

Thanks again for your G community suggestion; I will try it out.

Robert

Well put, thanks EGOL

What is interesting is that we are dealing with a lot of clients and have a very difficult time getting even the lowest end response from them. Then, most of those you can talk with recently went through training with the person sitting next to them that arrived a month earlier at best.

But they send this stuff out and make statements that really hurt our reputation. That is the pisser of the deal.

I disagree with your "shitty practice from Google." I personally think it is blatantly unethical.

Edit: by disagree, I mean that unethical is worse than shitty practice.

I think you will run into some problems with this:

** Since the apartment building now has a new brand name, new office address and phone number, the new owners want to create new online listings instead of claiming the old listings with the bad reviews. Also they want to report the old listings as "closed". **

Let's say I own an Apt complex or other business and I suck at it. I realize that all the bad reviews are killing me so I go out and change my business name and office address and then try to report all as new... This is the same thing even though your intent is different. This is one of the tactics used by "reputation management" firms of the less than notable variety. So, I do think you will run into issues and you need to tread quite softly.

Can it be done... maybe; but be prepared for issues with trying this approach. I think a danger you could face is that Google can look at it as simple reputation management play and you can then have trouble ever getting it to list. While we do not do reputation management, we do get clients who come to us due to Local problems who are now not showing up in Local from doing things that are outside terms of service. It is really hard to fix these.

Remember that in Local, the key is NAP. Name, Address, Phone. You are changing two of the three ( I realize you say there is a new office address but people will not search for the new office address and you are going to run into issues with the actual address of the apartments.) What are you going to do when someone searching for the apartment address gets the old listing. Remember there will be a ton of citation sources with old info.

With apartments, your other issue will be citation sources like Yelp or the BBB. Are they going to buy what you have to say about the management change, etc.? My guess is that is also going to be a bit tough to sell. With the new name, are you using a new URL and redirecting any value from the old? If so, you are trying to use what is helpful and jettison what is not, which again makes people question.

So, you might be better with getting new reviews showing the behaviors have changed and using a lot of under new management content, etc. Saying you are going to change is not inspiring at all. Even in your question you say the new management "...plan many improvements." That is not change, that is planned change. Show people the improvements in everything you do and make it clear it is not the same. Then even with the bad original reviews, when you start getting good reviews you will have much higher legitimacy.

Hope that helps even though there is no clear yes or no,

Robert

I am curious if this has happened to others and if so if you were able to resolve it.

Today a client forwarded an email that went to a client account and we were in no way copied on it. This is a client that spends in the 6 figures with us and I was shocked to read (Any bold or italics I have added):

Hi *****,

My name is Jimmy Morrow and I am an Account Strategist at Google on our Agency Team. Your account was recently selected for free dedicated support this quarter and I will be your new point of contact at Google for all things AdWords. We can go over a few housekeeping things I noticed, broader strategy, and some betas that would be a good fit. Please let me know when you have time for a 20-30 minute phone call when we can go over the accounts and make a plan for working together this quarter.

Thanks and just let me know a time that works best for you!

Best,

Jimmy

To me, they have essentially gone around us and with the "housekeeping" and "beta" comments sought to make us look either incapable and/or uninformed.

We are Google Partners, etc. and we have clients in our MCC for Adwords. I have never seen an occasion where Google blatantly tried to steal the client as it appears is happening here. This is a client who heretofore had NEVER used Adwords and they have been in business since before there was a Google or an Internet. We brought them to Adwords about 6 - 8 months ago!!! They are spending 6 figures on Adwords and I am ready to pull them out and spend the money elsewhere.

We sent emails from our UK and our Houston office and no response from lil ole Jimmy. Our UK team has tried calling Google and nothing and then Chatting with them and we can get nothing.

This is a client who has a lot of faith in our abilities based on many things we have done for them that worked and they are the kind of client that let's us know when issues arise. So, they are not going to switch and that is not the issue. The issue is Google acted as if they wanted to embrace agencies and if that is so, why then try to back door them?

I hope to hear from others who are handling PPC with Google. Thanks a ton.

Robert

I think Tom lays this out quite well and I would follow this advice.

Issac,

The more important issue is PA vs. DA. So, while you have a site with high DA, if the page is a new page with low PA or PR, the link is less valuable. Also, if there are many other links on that page, it will dilute the value of the link to you.

Personally, I would not waste time with trying to encourage traffic through a specific link. Your time is better spent continuing to create compelling content that gets you the links, etc.

I hope that helps,

Robert

You are looking at this a bit incorrectly. With the rollout of Panda, you are dealing with a change in the algorithm. If your site drops as the result of this, that is not really a "penalty" in the sense you are speaking of. So, while you lost ranking, your site is still being crawled and indexed.

With a Manual Penalty, potentially, you could have an impact on the frequency the site is crawled and whether or not pages that are penalized are indexed.

I hope this helps you understand it a bit better.

Robert