Unable to build google local listings, are citations still useful?
-
Hello
Google seems to be unhappy about letting us build google local profiles around our 'virtual locations, for each of which we have a dedicated page. We have approximately 100 'virtual locations' with addresses. I was wondering if, despite not being able to build google local profiles, it would still be worth it to build yahoo, bing, and utilize citation building services to each of those virtual locations. Would these citations in any way help bing or yahoo rank higher locally? Would the locally optimized city page rank higher as a result of all these citations?
This is a service-industry based website btw.
-
Hi Ilya,
No, there is not a backdoor way that I could advise. Google+ Local is all about local businesses and that does not fit your business model.
Regarding citations:
A citation is typically defined as any mention of your company name with full or partial contact information (address, phone number). It does not need to contain a link to your business. If it does contain a link, this would obviously help your business, overall, in the organic SERPs. If it is a non-linked citation, I suppose that might increase the prominence of your overall business, in that it would appear that lots of sites are talking about your company, but as you don't have physical offices, you would presumably be promoting places that don't really exist. In my view, that doesn't make sense.
Regarding creating profiles at Yahoo & Bing:
Yahoo's Local Listings Guidelines are here:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ll/guidelines/local-01.html
These guidelines state:
Provide accurate contact information. You must provide an accurate business address (including a valid street address) and phone number.
I cannot turn up Bing's guidelines for some reason, though their FAQ is here: http://www.bing.com/businessportal
While I cannot find them, I am pretty confident that their policy is similar to Google's and Yahoo's, in that they want physical businesses, not virtual ones, in their Business Portal.
Regarding How Google Can Tell You're Virtual:
I imagine they have a variety of strategies. One I've heard discussed is that they can tell via streetview, if something looks fishy to them. Another would be what you are saying about your company on your website, and what others are saying about you. If your business model is clearly virtual, chances of fooling Google are slim to none.
So, I'm afraid this isn't the answer you're hoping to hear, Ilya, but my advice would be to work on your organic SEO rather than trying to fit your virtual business into the Local box, because it's just not the right platform for what your company offers.
-
How would they tell if its a virtual location or not? I understand that they don't 'trust' us enough to let us have 20-30 locations activated even with phone activation, but can we get on google plus the back door way? by having 30-100 citations that all have the same name/address/phone number/etc and having google index them and think that they are missing these entries?
-
As Google has stated in their guidelines, they are not supportive of people having virtual locations or using PO Boxes for their local listings.I'm going to have our local expert chime in with more information as it related to Bing and Yahoo, and if they are at all moving in the same direction as Google.
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
-
India link building - any good ?
Hi Everyone We have clients that have very small budgets. We thought about outsourcing our link building to India to help with costs... Can anyone recommend any good Indian Link building companies that are well priced and that you have seen good results from ?? Any help would be much appreciated Thanks Guys Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ090 -
How to Recover From a Google Penguin Penalty?
My web site is hit by penguin penalty and got the mail from Google to my web master tool saying. "Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Link Building | | tinyinnovative
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to xxxxx.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.
Recommended action
Use the Links to Your Site feature in Webmaster Tools to download a list of links to your site.
Ensure that unnatural links pointing to your site are removed.
When these changes are made, and you are satisfied that links to your site follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines, submit a reconsideration request. If you're unable to remove links pointing to your site, please provide as much detail as possible in your reconsideration request.For an updated list of manual actions currently applied to your site, visit the Manual Actions page. If no manual actions are listed, there is no longer a need to file a reconsideration request."0 -
Listly and SEO
We use listly quite a lot. A few of our lists get embedded in other sites. A lot of the embedded lists have links back to us. Is there any seo benefit on this, or will just one of the sites count ? Isn't this just duplicate content ? Wondering what your thoughts are.
Link Building | | MarkQJones0 -
Backlink Lists
I am trying to create a valid list of backlink domain to disavow after a 50% traffic cut by Penguin......problem is I have now pulled lists from 4 tool and the lists are all different. I find a toxic domain from the tool run on LinkResearchTools and look on Google and Site Explorer and the toxic link does not even show. I look at the page and sure enough the link from year ago on a link farm is there. Is there really a rue definitive tool that will give me a list of all links? Better yet is there a tool that will help me evaluate which domain to disavow ? I want to follow Dr. Pete's advice and go slow but I am also anxious to cut ties with SEO work done by someone else in the hay day of link farm SEO and frankly looking at resent links some Bad SEO by competitors.
Link Building | | freestone0 -
Site not responding well to Link Building
I worked on around 15 EMDs and all of them have similar template but different content. They are all two KW EMDs. Now I did KW research and changed Title tags and Did around 10- 15 links for them in and they all reacted very well to link building except one site. I did the link building for this site in 3 batches- 7 links in first 10 days, then another 7 in next 10 days and another 7 links after 7 days. Site's ranking decreased with each link building. Then I removed the low quality links recently. Now What do you guys suggest should I again do link building?? (though everytime I did link building site lost rankings as mentioned earlier) or WHAT IS THE NEXT STRATEGY AFTER REMOVING BAD LINKS? START LINKING AGAIN, WAIT FOR SOMETIME ?
Link Building | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Looking to outsource some of our link building...
Hi Everyone, We are a small online marketing firm in the UK and we are starting to hit a bit of a bottleneck in terms of the resources that we have that can be devoted to link building. As a result, we need to outsource the link building for some of our clients (around 10). Obviously, we only want ethical, white hat link building to take place and it really is a focus on quality rather than quantity. As you can imagine, being a fairly small firm, we also have a very limited budget! We would ideally like to work with UK link builders but would definitely look at overseas partnerships if it worked out more cost effective and the standard of the link building meets our standards. Just so that I'm not wasting anyone's time, we have a budget of around £200-300 for this (I know, its a very limited budget!). I understand that with this budget comes limitations so we would be more than willing at looking at some stripped down packages (for example, we already have in-house bloggers, so we wouldn't need that). Let me know if you are interested or if you would be able to recommend anyone to me. It would be a great help. Matt
Link Building | | MatthewBarby
Wow Internet
matt@wowinternet.net0 -
Do Local Listings like Yellow Pages and yelp count for backlinks??
I am wondering if adding your company with url on a local listing like yellowpages.com, yelp.com, merchantCircle.com, etc. actually counts as a "backlink"? I'm thinking it is not considered a link because I have never seen one listing in Open site explorer, either that, or it is considered a backlink, just not one important enough for open site explorer to show it. Does anyone know for sure??
Link Building | | DTOSI0 -
Link Building: Asking for links versus building links
I am currently delving into link building for SEO having started out from a social media marketing side. From that angle, it was always my belief building high quality links came from engaging targeted bloggers and sites in my market and related verticals for product reviews and/or providing expert advise and opinion for posts they are creating. As I am learning more the "technical" side of SEO, I've read a lot of posters on here talk about asking from links from websites. While I get the concept from a strategic stand point, are links really asking for or is better to continue to pursue the long term investment of pitching to get coverage from well known bloggers and sites?
Link Building | | joshuaopinion1