Shutting down rogue G+ Pages
-
We are helping a client clean up some past agencies SEO work in G+ and needed to figure out the best way to shut down duplicate G+ pages.
The pages were created with post office boxes, household addressed, etc to create a location in multiple cities. What is the most efficient way to shut down 40+ pages in 5+ cites? Do we need to get usernames/passwords for all of these to shut them down?
Has anyone had luck getting Google's help on mass cleanup like this?
Signed,
Exhausted already!
-
I figured, but was hoping for some off the wall genius!
-
Thanks, SEO 5 Team. Appreciate the kind words!
-
Awesome response Miriam. No short cuts on this one Jake
-
Hi Jake,
Oh, my, that sounds like a really bad situation! Yes, you've got to get rid of these. If these listings are duplicates of an accurate, honest listing with a genuine physical street address, then the best thing to do is to use the 'report a problem link' on each page. Do not claim these listings! But do be logged into the client's authoritative account while you report the problems. Click the 'place is a duplicate' box and describe as best you can. In the description field, include the URL of the single, accurate listing. State that you are the business owner and are attempting to clean up spam created by a previous SEO company. Be as detailed as you can.
Now, once you've accomplished this, you need to engage in a citation cleanup campaign, searching the web for all possible references to these bogus addresses associated with the business name or phone number. These also need to be cleaned up to try to clean up Google's data cluster about the business.
Nota Bene: Before I touched this project, I would let the incoming client know that, while I will make my best effort, this level of spam is pretty egregious and I cannot guarantee results here because of this. The business may already be penalized. Bad citations may continue to auto-populate for years to come. It's really a mess. So, I would do my best, but 40 spam listings in 5 cities is a scarily tall order for anyone to clean up.
Hang in there, Jake. I'm not surprised you're already exhausted!
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
-
Gallery page with text below, Or split into two pages
So i'm a professional photographer, so my gallery is pretty important, probably more imprtant than the copy supporting it. Right now I have a gallery with supplementary info pushed below. I'm wondering if it would be better to remove the text from the bottom and put it to the top of it's own page, and leave the gallery page as just images, or keep it mixed with both. You can see my site directly HERE if you would like to see what i'm talking about exactly- the lightbox is broken, its a work in progress.
Image & Video Optimization | | JPRichardson0 -
Local SEO Question: Domain Wide Vs Specific Page
Hey Moz Community, Question about Local SEO authority and how it applies to a domain vs. landing page. Let me elaborate... Company is launching a new local out reach sales channel and merging it with our inbound sales channel under one brand. The plan thus far is to create a targeted landing page for local customers/leads. I have been tasked with creating the written content and making sure we are optimized as much as possible for this landing page to show up for our city. Funny enough for a lot of relevant terms we are already in the top 10 with little optimization (Also due to low competition for most of these terms) Two questions: 1. Should the whole site be optimized for local - appropriate schema markup, G+ business local set up, contact page with correct address formatting, building citations/local links etc.? To accompany our targeted page? 2. Will taking a local first initiative hurt reaching our non-local target market? If so will a very targeted landing page for local customers do the trick minus rest of local optimizations ? I guess what the question really boils down to is will optimizing for local hurt our broader inbound search reach/ranks in the long run? I want to be sure we are competitive to our broader audience and local audience on the same site with trying to get into sub-domains or considering re branding what is essentially the same department but for local purposes. Responses and sharing previous experience would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Image & Video Optimization | | paul-bold0 -
How can I improve my search results for local pages?
My test for this specific example is http://www.mylocalgaragerepair.com This client is trying to reach out for the local terms such as garage door repair for Temecula and other cities in riverside county. I build the following page. http://www.mylocalgaragerepair.com/temecula-garage-door-repair-temecula-garage-door-service/ What am I doing wrong? Is there some plugin's or other type things that would help my rank locally? If you solve this you've solved one of the main problems I'm having with my business. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Image & Video Optimization | | Smallbusinessdoctor0 -
Will it help/hinder our local seo by including our local adress on multiple pages?
We have a large website that targets the whole UK. It has landing pages for every town in the UK. For the towns that this particular business has a bricks and mortar hq, we have set up a local/places page. We then added the corresponding places adress to the appropriate town page on the website. This is just a handful compared to the 3,000,000 towns our site aims to rank for. Question: Would it help or hinder our SEO efforts to add the local addresses to other town pages in close proximity to the original? For instance say we have a places address for croydon in London. Would it hurt to add this address to pages that target towns near croydon, such as Mitcham. All opinions greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Image & Video Optimization | | Silkstream0 -
Video on Search Engine Results Page Ranking.
Hi, i have a question. I have a website of my company with Page and Domain Authority 55. PA:58 and DA:55 And now, i like to rank a video for my brand name on SERP. What to do? should i place the video on my main page, domain.com/index.php and to upload the video on the folder domain.com/video/ and than to optimize the video like images for SERP. I read articles online, about video sitemap, optimization etc.. but can you tell me the exactly steps to rank an video. What kind of video embed should i use? to upload at any vimeo,youtube, or should i upload on my hosting, what kind of coding etc.. if you have experience on video ranking, tell me the steps please. Thanks.
Image & Video Optimization | | leadsprofi0 -
Page speed not good despite CDN and caching. Can this be fixed?
My page speed results are here, showing a speed of 40 seconds. I get an F for compress text, compress images and cache static content.How do I resolve this? Also.. I've set up a CDN. Is it a problem for SEO, that there is a copy of all my images and content at cdn.mysite.com? We get lots of search traffic through google images search.
Image & Video Optimization | | devdg0 -
How to Track Traffic from Google Places Pages
Hi, Is there anything I need to do in Google Analytics to setup tracking for traffic coming to a site via it's Google Places page? I can see some traffic from maps.google.com in the Traffic Sources > Referring Sites report, but it does not appear to marry up to the data reported in the Google Places dashboard. Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | WCR0 -
Local Search - New Business - 4 different Erroneous, Unverified Google Places Pages
My client is a new business <1 year old. Google has 4 unverified places pages for this business - all have slight errors in the business name and address. Which one should I claim? Will Google let me change the business name once I verify ownership? How will I get rid of the other listings once I claim and correct one of them? In light of these data errors and/or as a general rule do you recommend the paid submission services for UBL and Localeze (http://getlisted.org/resources/why-listing-services.aspx)? Thanks for the help! Jeff
Image & Video Optimization | | jeffgibson0