Trying to de-mystify Google Places, Google Local & Google Plus
-
There is a lot of online 'noise' regarding the changes / merging and making the best out of Googles' Places / Local & Google Plus. Any tips, ideas, experiences or just plain revelations regarding all or any of the above services and how they will work & come together in the future?
-
Wow - that's a pretty all-encompassing question... I'm working on a blog post on exactly this subject...
But to really condense it all down - there are still a TON of bugs in the system, so don't attempt to merge your +Local listing with your +Business page unless you're absolutely sure that you don't have any data problems (so if you can push an update through the Places Dashboard and it shows up on your listing).
You'll need to request the merge by re-claiming your location through your +Business page, and it'll require postcard verification. After you've requested the postcard, don't change ANYTHING on the page or you can potentially break it and land your page in G+ Purgatory.
Once you get them merged, never use the Places Dashboard to change anything - do it all through your G+ page, or through community edits.
The release this weekend of the new +Biz management screen shows that hopefully they're moving in the right direction with a better admin experience. But for now, it's still pretty disjointed.
You CAN see some cool stuff on the right side of the SERPs once you've merged the two if you implement the rel=publisher tag... and we've seen G+ business posts get indexed VERY quickly.
BUT, you can't merge your +Biz with your +Local if you are a business with multiple locations - it's currently a 1-to-1 relationship - so if you want a single social feed for multiple locations, don't merge.
That was pretty high level... hope it helped...
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
-
Website Name Before Search String in Google SERP
I'm curious to hear whether it's better to have your company name before the Search String, or after it?When I search for Church Management Software in Google, some results place the company before the string.
Branding | | ChurchCommunityBuilder
**In attached image
(Pink Squares : Company Name)
(Blue Squares : Search String) Please indicate in your response if there is any study, experiment, or evidence to back your answer. Thanks for your help! NameOrStringNameOrString cmsSerp.jpg0 -
Google+ Page Question
When we do a search in Google for our brand name like this "google+ whiteboard creations" we see 2 different G+ pages: 1) https://plus.google.com/b/104564843813332206907/ and 2) https://plus.google.com/+WhiteboardCreations/ #2 is our real one which we are trying to promote, grow, etc, etc. However, I'm not sure where the other one came from. Did Google create it? We have the option to "Delete Page" in the settings, but unsure if it will delete the real page we actively manage. Has anyone else had this issue with multiple pages? Any advice as get into G+ more and more? Thanks in advance everyone! - Patrick
Branding | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Using keywords instead of brand name on G+ to rank for local terms.
I noticed something this morning, when performing a search on Google UK for "Intensive driving courses southend" the first position is awarded to a driving school that is using exact match keywords instead of brand name on their G+ page to rank for local terms. See this for yourself here: https://www.google.co.uk/#q=intensive+driving+courses+southend Until then, my site had held position 1 for this term for well over a year. Every gut instinct I have tells me that this will not work forever and its not something I should implement, however I'm interested to hear if anyone else is using this tactic, and how its working for them? How can I compete with this "grey hat" tactic?
Branding | | Silkstream0 -
Loop-hole to Google's Penguin update? Anyone else have some input?
So I have this theory and I’m wondering if anyone else has some input. I believe I have found a loop-hole to Google’s Penguin update. Let me explain. I work for a pretty competitive party planning company. Our biggest competitor for search is also our bread and butter to our company, our consultants. In addition to outside competitors trying to manipulate business from those consultants. Anyways, one of my top priorities is to not only rank for multiple pages on our site, but to also have our social sites rank on the first two pages. Recently I have watched a spamming MLM YouTube video review of our company crawl up the YouTube charts and out rank us for our Company name in YouTube search. And now, this week, the video has crawled up to rank 3<sup>rd</sup> behind our main site and Wikipedia for our brand keyword! So how does a YouTube video that is simply a review out rank us for our company name in our social platforms? Mind you he is also outranking our core social sites of which we have thousands of comments and interactions on per day? Looking at all of the metrics of the video, according to how I believe ranking to work in Youtube, there is no way this guy should be ranking as high as he is. The video has a decent amount of copy, it has fewer than 10,000 views, 76 thumbs up, 5 thumbs down, fewer than 2,000 subscribers and his channel only has 12 videos. It wasn’t until I was looking at our search results in Seomoz that I realized what this guy was doing to move up so quickly in rankings. He has 1,671 linking root domains to his video. He has been building excessive links to this video on Youtube. Well, since Google isn’t going to penalize its own website, the old technique of excessively building links to one page… seems to be working. Has anyone else come across something like this? Where building excessive links to a video or other social platform substantially has increased rankings?
Branding | | ScentsySEO0 -
Ideas for formal (prom) suit & dress giveaway contest
Hi fellow Mozzers, I'm hoping to do a bit of brainstorming if you don't mind helping out. We've never done a contest for our clients before, so want some ideas on how to get the most out of it. In Australia it is coming up to formal (Prom) time, and our client sells boys suits and girls formal dresses, so I figured it was a great time for a contest. It's a brand new SEO client, so it's quite late notice...the competition can only go for about 3 weeks because most of the school formals are around late November, early December. (Not ideal I know) The client is willing to give away one free suit, and one free dress, and I want to brainstorm some ideas on the format of the contest, e.g. what should people have to do to enter the draw? Avenues we plan to promote are: Facebook (they have 600 likers), Twitter (currently not many followers), I'm thinking Australian mummy bloggers, free contest listing websites, email database. Any other ideas for promotion? The goal for the contest is to increase brand exposure, and to attract lots of links. Looking forward to hearing your suggestions. Thanks, Karl
Branding | | Static_Shift0 -
How do you promote a G Plus page? Where are the G+ ads?
Hi All, My question doesn't actually refer to the fluent work of maintaining a page but rather to the basics. In our Facebook page we simply "bought" ads leading to our page and got the followers over time. I don't see an equivalent option in G+. Do I need to use regular adwords and point people to the G+ page or is there a place I can place ads inside G+? Thanks
Branding | | BeytzNet0 -
How to "Cause" a google alert
Hello Everyone, I'm just wondering, is there a quick and good way to actually cause a google alert for a keyword? I'm thinking of a press release, but there must be several other ways as well. I look forward to your response. Thanks!
Branding | | dmac
David0 -
Effective & Creative Ways to Market Detailed Buyers Guide/Whitepaper
My company has developed a detailed white paper/buyers guide for a specific type of widget that we sell, and we're looking for creative ways to market this content. We will be marketing it on our blog, plus via our ecommerce store's navigation. Any other suggestions?
Branding | | stevenmusumeche0