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What do you get for 'Plumber NYC'?

Interesting thing... I was spoofing my user agent in developer's tools. Queries from Nexus and iPad tablets still return the old map pack et. al. Interesting. I kind of thought of mobile and tablet as 'one thing', but apparently it's not - at least at the moment.

Confirmed it on physical tablets I have laying around. Yay internet appliances!

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Think of desktop search as a dying breed. That real estate doesn't really exist on mobile and tablet.

Those that have an address listed tend to have the Directions icon. Which isn't terribly useful for businesses that don't typically generate foot traffic. Poor SABs.

I initially thought The Googles were attempting to do away with the phone part of NAP confusion, for people. You know, click the Website icon... more than likely they'll get access to a good phone number. It may be unthinkable if all the listings have been well managed, but I would imagine that's the exception and not the rule.

I really want to know what they were thinking when they made packs for restaurants. No directions... no phone number... until one clicks through on a listing. Then you get what you wanted to know about to begin with (the actual listing... with phone, directions, menu...) followed by results related to the actual company. There's a difference between the click through display on desktop and mobile, but the gist is similar.

It seems like The Googles has been listening to an exceedingly drunk and confused focus group.

Desktop Fun:

Well, if a listing doesn't have a site linked to their Google MyOMGWTFBBQ (If they can't make up their mind, that's what I'm calling it.) and they rely on service calls, that business is kind of screwed for the time being.

Yeah, one would have a higher likelihood of clicking on the business name section - if we're only talking about pixel height and width. But that graphic, though. People look for buttons, even if that button is only 84x106 on desktop.

People click on graphics. They don't visit plumbers.

Developer Console (emulated mobile):

I'm getting the little phone handset (what an anachronism) icon.

A common thing a lot of people run into is using Apache redirect rules on nginx servers. Your server headers return nginx. I don't have any real world experience with nginx. Perhaps someone else does. In the mean time, here's a link from the official nginx docs which should help you with the nginx rewrite module.

Have fun storming the castle!

I read this one a little fast last night. I missed the qualification 'and accurate'. Keyword Planner might not be what you're looking for. But you can get a lot of spreadsheet rows populated, fast. XD

That would be Google Keyword Planner. You can bulk upload a bit more than what you need at the moment. You can also export the information. I haven't messed with a paid ad campaign recently, so something may have changed. But this article looks fairly accurate.

If that isn't floating your boat, you can also look into the SEM Rush API.

What is?

Are you sure about that?

Yes, the domain is propped up by pure spam. Have you reported it to The Googles? Venting on the forums may feel nice, but it doesn't get anything done.

It's ranking due to pure spam.

Yes.

Try:

https://goo.gl/

I'm sure some folks can tell you all about this evil, no good, site. But you kind of have to mention it, one way or another. URL shorteners are a good way to do so.

It was terrible to begin with. I understand that it was attempting to replace something similar to Google Alerts, but few use Regex. I can and do, but what the hell were people thinking?

There are grey areas with a bit of wiggle room. That much is certain. I've worked with practices/doctors where you're always routed to a call center. I've also worked with practices/doctors that actually pick up the phone from time to time.

But business is business and people are people. Things can get difficult and messy quick. A lot of doctors are people, engaged in business, as well as medicine. Sometimes business relationships end on bad terms.

Sometimes another local SEO is actively throwing wrenches in your program. It's all local business, so it's always a small world. Say they somehow know Dr. Smith has left the practice.

"Hello, I would like to schedule an appointment with Dr. Smith."

"Dr. Smith has left the practice, may I schedule an appointment with Dr. Jones?"

"No thank you, have a nice day."

Goes on to edit all Dr. Smith listings as closed.

And that's just one potential outcome.

It really and truly sounds like you're about to walk into a management nightmare. The main thing, according to Google's guidelines is; "He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours." So yes, it would appear that you can have a listing for each doctor at each location, provided the listings accurately represent when the doctors will be at each location.

One may think; "Hooray! I have so many shots at showing up in map packs!" Which may be true enough. But what happens when one of the doctors inevitably leaves for another practice? You may end up with a Closed listing. What if that Closed listing is the only one that displays for certain queries? Now spread that out over five or six locations.

The odds are that things can look pretty grim, given enough time.

If at all possible, select a doctor which is public facing and tends to stay at one location most of the week. The safest bet would be a doctor with some form of ownership. If you're already contractually obligated to provide a listing for every doctor at each location, it can and probably will get rough.

There's no guarantee, other than the site isn't likely to rank for Louis Vuitton. In general, Google will pick the best of the worst in any niche/vertical which has a proclivity for link spam. So that's something to consider, if such is the case.

Definitely disavow anything you deem inappropriate. Make sure to mention the circumstances in a properly formatted disavow file. A couple of good resources one should keep in mind are this Google Webmaster's answer and Dr. Pete's post.

You may want to buy the domain and get a simple, single, page up and running. Then connect it to Search Console/Webmaster Tools, to get a better idea of the domain's link profile. Robert Fisher's people, over at drumBeat, noticed that a lot of sites block bots associated with popular backlink reporting tools.

Once you have your link list, load it up in Screaming Frog and make sure to spoof the Google bot user agent.

Can you associate any sort of penalty that lines up with the time the domain went rogue? I'm sure it's probably difficult, given the nature of the case. No matter what, make sure to mention the circumstance of the links in the disavow.

Still, I would imagine it's probably not difficult to get the client to rank for his name. This is probably true if the targets are something like Name Surname Political Office Location. Without the ability to dig into it further, I would say the domain probably is salvageable if you take precautions.

I second, or third?, the notion that you should more than likely only have a single WordPress installation. It definitely would increase the maintenance involved. Take everything you should do to maintain an installation, then double it. I'm certain everyone in your organization could do without that.

But if your organization is willing to endure the duplication of effort, there are other things to be concerned about. Not every theme is created equal. Some themes are faster than others, some are more secure than others and most themes will differ in every other way. So one theme could be a hindrance, while the other at least pulls it's weight.

In regard to the subdomain blog or subfolder blog question, there was a time in recent history where I would have said it didn't matter. Supposedly the link equity/juice flows just fine either way. However, someone in Moz Q&A made a very good point. To paraphrase EGOL; "Algorithms change, if you install your blog on a subfolder you will always be right."

I'm not sure when your company made the jump to WordPress, but WordPress has had the ability to display static pages for years. My first agency used to run a combination of CMS Made Simple and WordPress, I think it was due to the page handling issue. That was over six years ago. They later made the jump to full WordPress about five years ago.

So it sounds like the site isn't properly configured for your purposes. Here is how you should handle that, direct from the WordPress codex. From there you can setup your site's page structure through parent/child relationships. So if you're selling widgets, your structure may look like:

**Page Hierarchy **

site.com/widgets/

site.com/widgets/blue-widgets

site.com/widgets/red-widgets

Posts Hierarchy

site.com/blog-diggety/

site.com/blog-diggety/sweet-post

There are Pages and Posts. You bring the hierarchy. And speaking of which, should you change your site URL structure, you will definitely want to research 301 redirects.

To me, there's no question in my mind. You should stick with one WordPress install. Hopefully that helps.

Ten. Years. Later. XD

It is pretty interesting to note that they specifically state they've removed the 'bonus' internet points from Thumbtack profiles. I would imagine they were told it might improve their case. It's definitely a bit of a SWAG on my part, but even the goofy internet points may have been considered material.

One could see how possibly having more 'internet points' may influence a purchase/contract decision. So that may be enough to support a materiality claim as well.