Questions
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Local SEO business name issue due to aggregator
Hey Tom, I see how this could be problematic. In general, Local SEOs will cite the guidelines Joey has, in which Google states they don't want this: Location information, such as neighborhood, city, or street name, unless it is part of the real-world representation of the business. So, short answer here is that you need to leave your name exactly as it appears in the real world on your websites and the citations that you can control (and, of course, your Google My Business listing). I wonder if it would be possible for you to reach out to the top 20 aggregators appearing for your core search and ask them to edit your listing name. If not, then the consolation here is that the playing field is level if competing colleges area all suffering the same fate with the aggregators. In other words, their percentage of NAP inconsistency would be the same as yours. Anecdotally, what you're experiencing is also experienced by all multi-location businesses that list their locations on Facebook. Facebook won't let you have more than 1 FB Place with an identical name, so you have to be Joe's Diner Boston, Joe's Diner Chicago, Joe's Diner St. Paul, etc. Again, because their competitors are all in the same boat, it's something they don't really have to sweat. 100% NAP consistency isn't normally achievable. You want to be as consistent as you can, but don't stress about attaining absolute perfection, and my bet is that the inclusion of your city names on these aggregators is not hurting you very much, if at all. So, this would be a see-what-you-can-do-and-then-leave-it-at-that situation. Hope this helps! Interesting thread.
Local Listings | | MiriamEllis0 -
Publishing pages with thin content, update later?
Each location has their own page, and each location page has their own departments listed with their own pages as well. Each department then has some content such as the NAP, an employee directory, and links to other resourceful pages on the website. If this is making many pages for each location, then I would worry about them. However, if all of this information is on a single page then you might be fine. If I owned a company like this I would require each location to give me substantive content. Also, if I "noindex" the pages to start, add some good content then "index" them, how long in your experience has it taken until you saw a considerable increase in traffic/see those pages indexed? I republished two of my thin content pages last week. These were noindexed for about two years. They were upgraded from two or three sentences and one photo to nearly 1000 words and four or five photos. One appeared in the index about five days later and went straight to #4 for a moderately difficult single word query. That single word query is the name of a software product, the name of some type of "gold" in the minecraft video game and has a lot of competition from .gov and .edu. . The second one was published about eight days ago and we have not seen it in the SERPs yet. This is an unusually long time for us to wait on a republished page for this site which has a DA of about 80. The way I would approach it would be to crawl those pages manually in Search Console (RIP Webmaster Tools) once I updated the "index" tag. I have never done this. I just republish the page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Google SERPs showing blog comments in Answer Box?
In short, due to the schema, I think Google mistook the comments for the author's twelve point outline.
Search Engine Trends | | RyanPurkey0 -
Why are certain words formatted as bold in Google+ Reviews?
Thanks for checking this out. I'm going to do some more digging and see if I can replicate this with other queries.
Reviews and Ratings | | TomBinga11250