Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do I get rid of rogue listings?
-
Unfortunately, Google has taken bits and pieces of my business and combined it with non-existent businesses and other rogue information. So now my business has 3 locations.
One proper listing that I created and manage.
One that uses my website address but nothing else is correct in the listing.
One that contains my name(incorrectly), but the address and everything else about it is incorrect.
I have reported these places many times but they continue to hang around and I am lost/confused on what to do next.
Please advise.
-
Hi Dignan,
The appropriate thing to do in cases like these it to go through the REPORT A PROBLEM link at the bottom of each problematic Place Page. It's a good idea to be signed into your account while doing this. Describe the situation and link to the correct listing for your business in the wizard. State that you have only one address - the one on your authoritative listing. Ask that these 2 other listings be removed.
Wait 4-6 weeks to hear back from Google (could take considerably less time these days, actually). If you do not see resolution, then take the matter to the new Google Places Help Forum. The new forum will be here:
http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/maps
Explain the steps you have taken and ask if a Top Contributor can please help you obtain resolution.
*In your shoes, I would also do some sleuthing to try to figure out where the other data is coming from...it's coming from somewhere and discovering the origin may help you to surmise what is going on.
Hope this helps and good luck!
Miriam
-
As you have your listing I would suggest that you continue to try and get those listings removed by reporting it to Google.
One way that you can demonstrate that your verified listing is the "credible" and only one is through local citation linkbuilding and getting people to place reviews on your listing.
The more activity will show hopefully push the other two down in SERP's and eventually be removed from Google.
Good luck,
Vahe
-
HI Brent,
Thanks for the reply. As of last week the phone numbers were different on the rogue listings, but I just checked...and guess what...both now have MY phone number.
So it looks like I could claim them. It was advised that the best way to deal with these listings would be to just report them to Google, opposed to claiming them.
They mentioned it was against the rules for me to have more than one listing(even if my intention was to nix the two rogue listings.)
Care to share your input?
-
This may be obvious but you haven't mentioned it. Did you try to claim the listings? Or are they already verified and claimed by somebody else?
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
-
What are best options for website built with navigation drop-down menus in JavaScript, to get those menus indexed by Google?
This concerns f5.com, a large website with navigation menus that drop down when hovered over. The sub nav items (example: “DDoS Protection”) are not cached by Google and therefore do not distribute internal links properly to help those sub-pages rank well. Best option naturally is to change the nav menus from JS to CSS but barring that, is there another option? Will Schema SiteNavigationElement work as an alternate?
Technical SEO | | CarlLarson0 -
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
URLs in Greek, Greeklish or English? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I am Greek and I have a quite strange question for you. Greek characters are generally recognized as special characters and need to have UTF-8 encoding. The question is about the URLs of Greek websites. According the advice of Google webmasters blog we should never put the raw greek characters into the URL of a link. We always should use the encoded version if we decide to have Greek characters and encode them or just use latin characters in the URL. Having Greek characters un-encoded could likely cause technical difficulties with some services, e.g. search engines or other url-processing web pages. To give you an example let's look at A) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1which is the URL with the encoded Greek characters and it shows up in the browser asB) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ελβετία The problem with A is that everytime we need to copy the URL and paste it somewhere (in an email, in a social bookmark site, social media site etc) the URL appears like the A, plenty of strange characters and %. This link sometimes may cause broken link issues especially when we try to submit it in social networks and social bookmarks. On the other hand, googlebot reads that url but I am wondering if there is an advantage for the websites who keep the encoded URLs or not (in compairison to the sites who use Greeklish in the URLs)! So the question is: For the SEO issues, is it better to use Greek characters (encoded like this one http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1) in the URLs or would it be better to use just Greeklish (for example http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvetia ? Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Lenia
Technical SEO | | tevag0 -
How do I get out of google bomb?
Hi all, I have a website named bijouxroom.com; and I was in the 7th page for the search term takı in google; and 2nd page for online takı. Now, I see that in one day my results seem to be on the 13th and 10th page in google respectively. I made too much anchor text for takı and online takı. What shall I do to gain my positions back? Thanks in advance. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ozererim0 -
Getting Pages Indexed That Are Not In The Main Navigation
Hi All, Hoping you can help me out with a couple of questions I have. I am looking to create SEO friendly landing pages optimized for long tail keywords to increase site traffic and conversions. These pages will not live on the main navigation. I am wondering what the best way to get these pages indexed is? Internal text linking, adding to the sitemap? What have you done in this situation? I know that these pages cannot be orphaned pages and they need to be linked to somewhere. Looking for some tips to do this properly and to ensure that they can become indexed. Thanks! Pat
Technical SEO | | PatBausemer0 -
How to get Google to index another page
Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110 -
Struggling to get my lyrics website fully indexed
Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research! My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website. Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now. My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed. I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed! I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google. Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!
Technical SEO | | SEOed0 -
Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?
We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr
Technical SEO | | dim_d0