Anyone managed to change 'At a glance:' in local search results
-
On Google's local search results, i.e when the 'Google places' data is displayed along with the map on the right hand side of the search results, there is also an element 'At a glance:'
The data that if being displayed is from some years ago and the client would if possible like it to reflect there current services, which they have been providing for some five years.According to Google support here - http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1344353 this cannot be changed, they say
'Can I edit a listing’s descriptive terms or suggest a new one?
No; the terms are not reviewed, curated, or edited. They come from an algorithm, and we do not help that algorithm figure it out. 'My question is has anyone successfully influenced this data and if so how.
-
You are very welcome. My pleasure to help!
-
Hi Miriam
Thank you for your comprehensive answer. I will look at the resources that you have provided and perhaps conduct some tests of my own.
Once again, thank you.
-
Hi CodingStuff,
Good question, and I empathize with frustration on this. The At A Glance feature often points up the most absurd snippets. You can report the issue through this form:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs
....but, Google will apparently only consider changing it if it contains totally wrong information (like jewelry appearing on a restaurant listing) and even then, it's unlikely to see action happen on their part. So, this leaves us with trying to understand the cause/source of these snippet sentiments. Mike Blumenthal wrote a great post on this in 2011 when these first appeared:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/08/30/google-places-descriptor-snippets/
In that post, he points to a Bill Slawski piece on a patent that appears to relate to this sentiment display:
http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/08/google-boost-search-rankings-category/
And here's a good discussion on this topic in Google's forum:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/wDRAXAl1gyA
The sources of the snippets have appeared to stem mainly from reviews, but also from links and website content. Usually, it's pretty easy to trace language in the snippets to things that have been said in reviews, at least in my experience. So, here we come to another hands-are-a-bit tied situation, because you aren't able to control what people say in their reviews. Even one bad review can end up tacking an awful sentiment to your profile in the At A Glance section.
I have never seen research done on how often Google internally refreshes At A Glance sentiments, but it stands to reason that the acquisition of a gentle but ongoing stream of positive reviews for the business would be the strongest action one can take to hope to see a change in the sentiments. Without seeing your actual profile, I have to speak broadly on this, but that would be my basic advice. You can make an effort to report the issue to Google and there is a slim chance you might get somewhere with that, but in most cases, you'll just have to work at getting reviews in hopes of seeing an eventual change to the snippets.
For good recent reading about the topic of getting Google-based reviews, here's another piece by Mike Blumenthal that you may find helpful:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/24/asking-for-reviews-post-apocalypse/
I hope these resources help you feel up-to-speed on this sometimes frustrating topic. Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How get google reviews on search results?
Hi, We have good google reviews. (4,8) Can we get this rating stars also on our organic search results ? Best remco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remcoz0 -
Google Update? Anyone seeing a drastic change in rankings?
Hey everyone, Has anyone seen a drastic change in clients Google Rankings, we have one which has dropped from 9.5% visibility to 5.4% in one month.. It's extremely worrying as I have never seen a drop like this before since I've managed the account, in fact rankings have increased month on month since we took over the account. I've also looked at google, no penalty showing, I've started removing spammy sites who link to us and also added no follow to some of the links on the site which linked out to try and keep some link juice in the site. Anything else I can try / do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Unbranded_Lee2 -
Google Search Console
abc.com www.com http://abc.com http://www.abc.com https://abc.com https://www.abc.com _ your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
Hello, We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools. However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below https://www.google.com.au/search?espv=2&q=site%3Awww.mypetwarehouse.com.au+inurl%3Agclid&oq=site%3A&gs_l=serp.3.0.35i39l2j0i67l4j0i10j0i67j0j0i131.58677.61871.0.63823.11.8.3.0.0.0.208.930.0j3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..8.3.419.nUJod6dYZmI Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation? Thanks, Stephen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyPetWarehouse0 -
Keywords Ranking Varies When Search changes Location/City (Not Google Places)
We have a client that are ranking well on most Australian cities for competitive keywords except Google Sydney. If you toggled the cities on the search field when you search for a keyword, their places are almost exactly the same except for Sydney on which they can't be found at all in the Top 100 results. The keywords are not city specific, they are general commonly searched keywords about health. This is not a Google Places issue. The search result shows the right landing pages of the site for their respective keywords. Any ideas or experience on this kind of situation. Much appreciated Louie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | louieramos0 -
What would your Seo tactic's be for this
Hiya guys... Just a quicken, So my forum, talknightlife.co.uk is currently 10th on google for "nightlife forum" I have about 15 back links, 26 page autority. Now what i'm trying to do, which everyone else is doing, is trying to move it up a couple of spots maybe to 5th or something. What would your tactics be, I'm disregarding all the crap I read in the forums etc, you guys on here tend to have the best explanation. Let it rip 🙂 Cheers guys Luke.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukescotty0 -
Website change of address
Hi Everyone, I apologize if the answer to this questions is obvious, but I wanted some input on how changing our web address of our site will affect our SERP. We are looking to change our website address from a.com to b.com due to rebranding of our company (primarly to expand our product line as our current url and company name are restricting). I understand that this can be done using 301 direct and via webmaster tools with google. My question is how does this work exactly? Will our old website address show in SERP rankings, and when a user clicks on the listing are they redirected to our new address? With regards to building new links from press releases etc, do we have links point to our new web address or the old one in order to increase SERP? Does google see our old address and new address as the same website and therefor it does not matter where inbound links point to and both will increase our ranking positions? It took 6 years of in house seo to get our website to rank on the first page of all the major search engines for our keywords, so we am being very cautious before we do anything. Thanks everyone for your input, it is greatly appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AgentMonkey0 -
Anyone in the fitness industry?
I have a lot of websites and they are all fitness related. Some are affiliate sites and some are blogs. I've made some great relationships with some big players in the fitness space and it has worked out well for both of us. Is anyone here in the fitness industry? Are you open to building new relationships? Do you know other websites or blogs in the industry open to creating new relationships? I don't mean a simple link exchange, I mean a real relationship where sites try to help each other out more than an arbitrary link in a list on some resource page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0