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Hi Reubenb, From your description, it sounds like you are dealing with an accidental merge of the business listings. This is a very common occurrence in the multi-practioner scenario (lawyers, doctors, etc.). As you've already deleted the listing, I can't really offer advice on this, but I would recommend that you visit the Google And Your Business Forum and read up on the subject of 'merged listings'. There are 2 forms of merging, however, and you'll see threads about both types. One is the type of merging I am guessing happened to your listings in which the details of two listings are similar and Google accidentally combines them. The other is the intentional merge of a local and social page to achieve a fully merged listing - this does not concern you, so you can ignore threads about this. Here's the link to the forum: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business I would also recommend that you look through threads in the Duplicate/Merges section of the Local Search Forum here: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-duplicates-merges/ That should bring you up-to-date on this topic.

Hey, Why use a separate domain for US? Presumably you've already built up authority in the root domain so why waste that effort on a completely new domain like companyusa.com? I would set-up sub-folders all around: UK - company.com/en-gb/ USA - company.com/en-us/ Germany - company.com/de/ Also gives you scope to optimize for Latin America too if you ever wanted, like so - company.com/es-mx/ To ensure the correct version of the site ranks in the correct Google CC, setup each site as it's own entity in webmaster tools and set geo-location correctly per site. Also you could implement href-lang meta tag on each page to tell Google which version of the translated content should be indexed in the country specific Google, google.de, google.co.uk etc. Hope that helps, Woody

Probably creating backlinks with those name variations in the anchor tags might help. But why spend time and resources trying to make his site show up if people Google his name and/or name variations and not focus on making the site show up when people Google keywords related to the content/services/info John Smith offers?

Ah, in that case the main factor is: how are all ranking currently? If they each receive traffic for their respective local keywords, it would make sense to just keep them as is (don't fix what ain't broken). However, if you feel they aren't getting the rankings they deserve, you should combine all the sites into 1 and consolidate the authority. As long as you set up 301 redirects correctly, you should be able to transfer your rankings and even improve them (if you set up your internal linking structure correctly). Just know you will most likely lose rankings for around 2 weeks. Something to keep in mind: it's much easier to maintain and improve one website over three. If you plan on generating new content (as you should), having 1 blog with kickass content is far better than 3 mediocre ones. Best, Oleg

I think this is a good opportunity for making experiments: Try to re-write content on one of these sites and keep untouched the other one. You can always say the same with different words. Try different keywords for each specific page on one site and another and monitor them. This way you can evaluate the suitability of each keyword. Obviously, due to those legal reasons, I imagine there is no chance to use redirections from one site to another, so the best option is to generate different content for each site. Hope it helps. Sergio

Wow, that easy. I was everywhere INSIDE the campaign. Thanks a lot.