Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey There! I want to be sure that you understand how to interpret your Moz Local listing score, and have a good sense of what Moz Local is doing for and what you can take manual action on. When you sign into your Moz Local dashboard and click on a business listing there, you are taken to a business details page where you will see your overall listing score. This score is comprised of your status on the 7 partner sites in our network + the status of your listings on 8 non-partner sites, as well. The 7 supported partner sites in our network are: Factual Foursquare Neustar/Localeze Infogroup Best of the Web Acxiom Superpages Once you’ve uploaded your listing to Moz Local, it’s our job to push your data out to the above 7 partner sites. Your overall listing score will begin to rise as each of the above listings achieves updated status. The rise may be gradual rather than instantaneous, but should be noticeable over time. You should be sure you’ve filled out as many details as possible on your listing so that it can achieve a maximum score. If you’ve filled out all of these fields, you’re good to go on this and it’s our job to take it from there, pushing out your data to the 7 partners. As each partner achieves updated status, your listing score will gradually begin to rise. Apart from this, you can contribute to a rise in your listing score manually by improving your listings on the non-partner sites shown on the details page. These non-partner sites are: Google Facebook Yelp Hotfrog YP Citysearch Yahoo! Bing On the details page, if you discover that we are reporting issues to you under the ‘Inconsistent’ and ‘Incomplete’ tabs on any of the above non-partner sites, you should consider taking manual action to correct these things. This activity on your part will also eventually contribute to a rise in your listing score. However, if you don't have login information for these sites, your ability to work on these non-partner sites is definitely going to be limited. You may need to work at contacting each of the platforms individually to see if they can help you regain control of the listings. Finally, if our tool also surfaces duplicate listings for you, you’ll want to pay close attention to these. If the duplicates are on any of the 7 partner sites, you can simply click the ‘close’ button. If they are on the non-partner sites, clicking the close button will take you to a page on the associated site where you will need to work manually with the platform to request closure of the duplicate. Again, you may need to do some spadework to see if these non-partner platforms can help you get back in control of the listings. Taken altogether, the work we are doing to push your data to the 7 partner sites and the work you do on the non-partner sites will contribute to a rise in your listing score. I hope this helps you feel fully informed about our service and your opportunities! Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for the good advice, Jesse!

Thank you for the help.  I thought it sounded a bit odd!

Oops. I only just noticed the date on this question! Sorry folks...

Thank you all for your help and answers!  Barry, we re-created the Sitemap via FTP and it easily took it!  Also, we noticed that Chrome will not display the actual XML Sitemap...so we checked it in IE....works perfectly.  Again, thank you all for your help! Jay

ryan, thank you for the help!

Thank you, both, for the help! Jay

The client wanted the entire site under https, against advice and knowledge.  Why is it always "the client"?!  Thank you for your idea on the canonical...nice idea. Jay

You can change the setting in your google preferences if desired.

I would not add it to every page - Also it looks very spammy to have it that long Use keywords in urls to signal google what the page is about

A. URLs are best when they are short and static. Shorter URLs are more likely to be shared, typed-in, and they look better. Make sure there is only one website version like James said.

Hi I most definitely would use them.  You may want to remove "the" or other extraneous words. Also, keep whatever is before it in the url short, and preferably only one level deep.  So if you're viewing an individual blog post:  www.domain.com/blog/this-is-the-url-of-the-blog-post If they are just so ridiculously long (like over 15 words) maybe its a sign your titles themselves are too long. -Dan

I've had two situations with Google Places that might help you. First, for some reason they have chosen to use the state road number for the name of our street even though Google Maps shows both state road number and street name. The street name has been in effect for more than five years. I've tried for several months to get it changed. Places refers me to Maps and says I have to be the owner, which I am, to make changes and Maps won't quit calling the street the state road number which no one around here knows or uses. So far nothing I've done has fixed it. Second, we have a legal name and a dba for our business. I mistakenly made submissions for both to Google Places--a duh moment.  It took several months to fix it. Taking the "speed" of changes to listings in Google Places into consideration, I suggest that you wait until you have a physical location with a landline phone. Otherwise, you will have to make two changes (to P.O. Box and then to physical address) which could take a long time to happen. Verifying with a phone number is really fast.

You might also consider writing the redirect so that you don't have any extensions (see the SEOmoz URL for an example). That way, whenever you next change technologies, your URL will still stay the same.

Hi Donnie. Thank you for the links! Lots of reading to do.