Google Places Page Changes
-
We had a client(dentist) hire another marketing firm(without our knowledge) and due to some Google page changes they made, their website lost a #1 ranking, was disassociated with the places page and was placed at result #10 below all the local results.
We quickly made some changes and were able to bring them up to #2 within a few days and restore their Google page after about a week, but the tracking/forwarding phone number the marketing company was using shows up on the page despite attempts to contact Google through updating the business in places management as well as submit the phone number as incorrect while providing the correct phone number. And because the client fired that marketing company, the phone number will no longer be active in a few days. Of course this is very important for a dental office.
Has anyone else had problems with the speed and updating Google Places/Plus pages for businesses? What's the most efficient way to make changes like this?
-
My pleasure! Hope it works out for you.
-
That helps a lot! I've never been able to reach Google by phone.
Thanks for the local advice, I appreciate it.
-
Hi TVinson,
You mention that you've attempted to contact Google. Have you actually phone them? I'm hearing quite good things about the speed at which some issues have been resolved after a successful phone call. Check out this post from Matthew Hunt:
http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/google-places-support-live-real-person-2-minutes/
Also, you need to be sure that you are cleaning up any references to the call tracking number, not only because they are taboo in Local, but because you don't want anything but clean NAP (name-address-phone) anywhere on the web for the client. If the bad phone number was published or aggregated in multiple places, you need to clean up those citations to prevent them from being picked up again by 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
-
Use Internal Search pages as Landing Pages?
Hi all Just a general discussion question about Internal Search pages and using them for SEO. I've been looking to "noindexing / follow" them, but a lot of the Search pages are actually driving significant traffic & revenue. I've over 9,000 search pages indexed that I was going to remove, but after reading this article (https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/seo-internal-search-results/) I was wondering if any of you guys have had success using these pages for SEO, like with using auto-generated content. Or any success stories about using the "noindexing / follow"" too. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages
We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th. It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
Page Indexing increase when I request Google Site Link demote
Hi there, Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion? I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high. From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument. However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there. However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved. I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd. However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks. Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page. Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before. Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre. Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause. Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect. Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool. Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences. One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact. Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th. Thanks David
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Pages removed from Google index?
Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TomLondon0 -
How long does it take for Google for deindexing pages?
Hi mozzers, We just launched a mobile website(parallel) and realized that it created many duplicate content with desktop URLs. I decided to add name="robots" content="No index, No follow" /> to the entire mobile site. My only concern is that I am still seeing the mobile site indexed when it's been almost a week I added these tags. Does anyone know how long it takes google to deindex your content? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Unnecessary pages getting indexed in Google for my blog
I have a blog dapazze.com and I am suffering from a problem for a long time. I found out that Google have indexed hundreds of replytocom links and images attachment pages for my blog. I had to remove these pages manually using the URL removal tool. I had used "Disallow: ?replytocom" in my robots.txt, but Google disobeyed it. After that, I removed the parameter from my blog completely using the SEO by Yoast plugin. But now I see that Google has again started indexing these links even after they are not present in my blog (I use #comment). Google have also indexed many of my admin and plugin pages, whereas they are disallowed in my robots.txt file. Have a look at my robots.txt file here: http://dapazze.com/robots.txt Please help me out to solve this problem permanently?
Technical SEO | | rahulchowdhury0 -
How best to set up Google + business pages for clients
I wish to setup a business page on google+ business page for my clients but it requires a personal profile, my clients don't want a personal profile but do want the business page. Currently i have set them up with pages on my personal profile but do can i allow the client to manage it? so i am not sure this is the best way Whats the best way for web developers to setup Google+ accounts for clients?
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb1 -
Change in how Google displays SERPs
Hi All, Recently our SERPs have changed in Google results to show product prices from our pages rather than the meta description. This just started to happen in November with no change (that we know of) on our side. I have attached a from and to SERP image if that helps. Does any one have any ideas as its starting to effect our rankings? Thanks, Tony. Tkeou,6jg6Q Tkeou,6jg6Q#1
Technical SEO | | tstauntonwri0