Top 9 reasons Google suspends local listings

Has your business listing in Google been suspended? Not sure what happened? Columnist Joy Hawkins discusses the likely causes and how to address them.

I see threads over at the Google My Business forum all the time from panicked business owners or SEOs who have logged into Google My Business to see a big red “Suspended” banner at the top of the page. The Google My Business guidelines have a very long list of things you shouldn’t do, but some offenses are much more serious than others.

Before I get into which rule violations lead to suspensions, it’s important to know the facts around suspensions.

Google won’t tell you why you got suspended

A Google employee will rarely tell you why your account got suspended.

Business owners often want Google to spell out what rule caused their suspension, but Google isn’t about to help rule-breakers get better at doing it and avoid consequences.

There are two different types of suspensions

The first type of suspension is what I refer to as a soft suspension. This is when you log in to Google My Business and see the “suspended” label and no longer have the ability to manage your listing. However, your listing still shows up on Google and Google Maps/Map Maker.

In this case, the listing has really just become unverified. Since you broke Google’s guidelines in some way, they have removed your ability to manage the listing, but the listing’s ranking is rarely impacted. I once worked with a locksmith who ranked first in a major metro area; even after his account got suspended, his ranking didn’t decline.

To fix this type of suspension, all you need to do is create a new Google account, re-verify the listing and stop breaking the rules.

The second type of suspension is what I call a hard suspension. This is very serious and means your entire listing has been removed from Google, including all the reviews and photos. When you pull up the record in Google Map Maker, it will say “removed.”

In this case, your only solution is to get Google to reinstate it; however, the chances of that are slim because this generally only happens when Google has decided the business listing is not eligible to be on Google Maps.

Following are the top nine reasons that Google suspends local listings:

1. Your website field contains a forwarding URL

I dealt with a case last year where I couldn’t figure out why the listing got suspended. Google was able to publicly confirm that it was because the website URL the business was using in Google My Business was actually a vanity URL that forwarded to a different domain.

As per the guidelines, “Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to landing pages.” This often results in a soft suspension.

2. You are adding extra keywords to your business name field

As per the guidelines: Adding unnecessary information to your name (e.g., “Google Inc. – Mountain View Corporate Headquarters” instead of “Google”) by including marketing taglines, store codes, special characters, hours or closed/open status, phone numbers, website URLs, service/product information, location/address or directions, or containment information (e.g., “Chase ATM in Duane Reade”) is not permitted.

This often results in a soft suspension, since the business is still eligible to be on Google Maps but just has a different real name.

3. You are a service-area business that didn’t hide your address

According to Google’s guidelines on service-area businesses, you should only show your address if customers show up at your business address. Whenever I’ve seen this, it was a hard suspension, since the listing was not eligible to show up on Google Maps based on the Map Maker guidelines.

It’s extremely vital for a business owner of a service-area business to verify their listing, since Google My Business allows them, but Map Maker does not. This means any non-verified listing that appears on Google Maps for a service-area business can get removed, and the reviews and photos will disappear along with it.

4. You have multiple verified listings for the same business

According to the guidelines: “Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts.”

Google will often suspend both listings (the real one and the duplicate you created) but will un-verify the legit one (soft suspension) and remove the duplicate (hard suspension).

5. Your business type is sensitive or not allowed on Google Plus

This one is new to me, but recently Google suspended (soft suspension) a gun shop and claimed the business type is not allowed on Google Plus. Since every verified listing is automatically on G+, the only option is for them is to have an unverified listing on Google Maps.

According to the Google Plus guidelines, regulated goods are allowed if they set a geographic and age restriction, so the jury is still out on whether Google will reinstate it or not.

6. You created a listing at a virtual office or mailbox

Google states: If your business rents a temporary, “virtual” office at a different address from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours.

I often see businesses creating multiple listings at virtual offices because they want to rank in multiple towns and not just the city their office is actually located in. If Google catches them or someone reports it, the listings will get removed (hard suspension).

7. You created a listing for an online business without a physical storefront

The first rule for eligible businesses is that they must make in-person contact with customers. Since online businesses don’t do this, Google specifies that they are supposed to create a G+ brand page instead of a local page, which means they won’t rank in the 3-pack or on Google Maps.

I was once helping out a basket store in Ottawa on the Google My Business forum that creates custom gift baskets that you can order online. When I escalated it to Google to fix something, they unexpectedly removed her listing completely (hard suspension) because she ran an online store.

8. You run a service or class that operates in a building that you don’t own

For example, my church has an AA group that meets there weekly. They would not be eligible for a listing on Google Maps. According to the guidelines, “Ineligible businesses include: an ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don’t own or have the authority to represent.”

9. You didn’t do anything wrong, but the industry you are in is cluttered with spam, so the spam filters are tighter

I commonly see this most often with locksmiths. I have run into several legitimate locksmiths who have had their listings suspended (hard suspensions, usually) because the spam filter accidentally took them down.

In this case, I would always suggest posting on the Google My Business forum so a Top Contributor can escalate the case to Google.

Conclusion

Has your listing been suspended for reasons I didn’t mention? Feel free to reach out to me or post on the forum and share your experience.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/top-9-reasons-google-suspends-local-listings-247394

Improve internal linking for SEO: Calculate Internal PageRank

Columnist Paul Shapiro shares his method for determining what pages on your site might be seen as authoritative by search engines, based on a metric he calls "internal PageRank."

Your site architecture — the way you structure and organize internal links (e.g., a link to the About Us section of your website from your main navigation) — plays a vital role in how both users and search engines are able to navigate your website, ultimately impacting your website’s rankings.

Modern search engines use links to crawl the web. The crawlers used by these search engines click on each link that appears on a page — both internal links and external links — and then all the links on each subsequent page, and so on. This allows the search engines to find your pages and rank them in their indices.

Search engines such as Google also use the number of links to rank query results, considering each link as a vote of importance for a page (i.e., PageRank).

For this reason, the way you link the pages on your website plays a big role in how search engines crawl, understand and rank your site. As an SEO practitioner, how do you make sure your site architecture is optimal and that internal links are organized correctly? Let’s explore how calculating a metric I call Internal PageRank can help us with this task.

Basic site architecture and navigation-based internal links

There are two basic types of internal links:

1. The internal links that form your site’s navigational structure
2. The secondary internal links that appear in context throughout your site (in articles and other places that aren’t necessarily a product of your site’s navigational structure)

Let’s look at the former. The first step to getting your internal links in order is to organize common navigation elements and adhere to a well-organized site structure. I recommend creating a classic internal linking structure and utilizing Bruce Clay’s silo architecture as a foundation for internal links. These are tried and tested, logical site structures that work. Here’s an example from Portent:

Now that your site has a solid foundation for internal links, let’s take a look at how these navigational links, as well as the internal links that exist in context, might impact how the search engines crawl and rank your pages. To look at the overall internal linking impact, we will examine the internal PageRank of all the pages.

What is PageRank?

Before we continue, let’s take a moment to discuss what PageRank is. PageRank is one of the algorithms that Google uses to rank web pages in their search results. It is named after Larry Page, one of the co-founders of the company.

The PageRank algorithm, put simply by Google, “works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is.”

Internal PageRank?

Google calculates PageRank for every page in its index, linking various pages within a site together, as well as linking other websites to those pages. But the idea behind PageRank — determining the importance of a page based on links from other pages — can be applied across a large network (like the one uncovered by Google’s crawler) or across a smaller subset of a network.

For the purpose of examining internal links, we will utilize the idea of PageRank to look at the relative importance of each page on a single website.

By “Internal PageRank,” I am referring not to Google’s PageRank algorithm, but to a similar calculation based on the internal links of a single website. Let’s get started and calculate Internal PageRank for your site.

Note: To be clear, I’m not talking about or advocating for PageRank sculpting. I’m talking about using a PageRank-like metric to diagnose any issues within your site architecture. This will become clearer when I run through an example.

Step 1: Crawl with Screaming Frog

Before we can actually calculate Internal PageRank, we need to crawl our website. For this example, I use Screaming Frog, as it is a standard tool in an SEO practitioner’s arsenal.

Start by launching Screaming Frog and crawling your website. When the crawl is finished, select Bulk Export > All Outlinks from the top menu, and save the CSV file to your desired location.

The CSV contains a list of all the internal links on your website. We will use this list to create a network and calculate Internal PageRank.

Step 2: Calculate Internal PageRank with R

If you’re not familiar with R, it’s a free software for statistical computing and graphics that runs on a wide variety of platforms. Download and install it, if you don’t already have it.

Install the igraph library by launching the R console and executing:

install.packages("igraph")

Once the library is installed, you will be able to use the following code in conjunction with the Screaming Frog crawl for your site:

	library("igraph")
	# Swap out path to your Screaming Frog All Outlink CSV. For Windows, remember to change backslashes to forward slashes.
	links <- read.csv("C:/Documents/screaming-frog-all-outlinks.csv", skip = 1) # CSV Path
	# This line of code is optional. It filters out JavaScript, CSS, and Images. Technically you should keep them in there.
	links <- subset(links, Type=="HREF") # Optional line. Filter.
	links <- subset(links, Follow=="true")
	links <- subset(links, select=c(Source,Destination))
	g <- graph.data.frame(links)
	pr <- page.rank(g, algo = "prpack", vids = V(g), directed = TRUE, damping = 0.85)
	values <- data.frame(pr$vector)
	values$names <- rownames(values)
	row.names(values) <- NULL
	values <- values[c(2,1)]
	names(values)[1] <- "url"
	names(values)[2] <- "pr"
	# Swap out 'domain' and 'com' to represent your website address.
	values <- values[grepl("https?:\\/\\/(.*\\.)?domain\\.com.*", values$url),] # Domain filter.
	# Replace with your desired filename for the output file.
	write.csv(values, file = "output-pagerank.csv") # Output file.

Simply follow the code comments (denoted by #) and don’t forget to:

1. Specify the path to your Screaming Frog CSV file.
2. Specify your domain and TLD extension.
3. Name your output file, which will contain the Internal PageRank of each individual page on your website.

Examples

Let’s run through a couple of examples on some real websites.

Catalyst Digital

Our agency, Catalyst Digital, recently relaunched our website after a rebrand, and we are still working out some of the kinks. So I decided to crawl the new site and examine its Internal PageRank.

Here is a sample of the output:

Looking at the site pages in terms of Internal PageRank, we see that our top page is our contact page. That doesn’t look right!

You wouldn’t be able to see this based on typical site crawl. For example, Screaming Frog indicates that the contact page actually has one link fewer than the home page, despite the higher Internal PageRank value. Internal PageRank, like Google’s PageRank algorithm, takes into account whichlinks are linking to that page in the network, rather than just the quantity of links.

There are fewer internal links to the contact page, despite a higher Internal PageRank value.

Now, let’s search for our brand name in Google:

Our Google search confirms we have a problem. Our agency’s contact page is ranking above our home page in organic results, likely due to how we have structured our internal page links.

Now that we are aware of this problem, we can take a look at our site architecture and start to craft a solution. Knowledge is power.

Online Geniuses

Let’s run a similar test on Online Geniuses, an internet marketing Slack community that I moderate, and see if anything comes up.

Here’s a sample of the output from R:

The website has a job board page that has a higher Internal PageRank value than our home page. It’s not causing a problem for us yet, likely due to the number of external links pointing to the home page and the difference in our keyword usage, but it’s probably something we should look into to maintain site integrity.

Conclusion

You should now have some sense of how you structure your internal links on your website. After you have established a basic structure for your navigation-based internal links, you can start to audit your site for internal linking issues by crawling your website and calculating Internal PageRank using R.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/improve-internal-linking-calculate-internal-pagerank-r-246883

Searching for searchers: Audiences are the new keywords

As we continue to shift towards audience-centric marketing, columnist Christi Olson of Bing notes that we can create more effective remarketing campaigns by asking the right questions about our searchers.

Search as we know it is changing, with keywords and match types giving way to a more audience-powered approach. It’s a transition that has been slowly coming, but now that remarketing and remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) are available on Bing and Google, search marketers can no longer afford to ignore audience-based buying.

In the new search world order, searching for searchers will increasingly be a part of every successful marketer’s integrated search strategy.

Welcome to the new world of search

In the early days of search, keywords and match types were the main levers search advertisers used to find customers. Keywords allowed us to reach the consumers who were searching for our products and services, while match types allowed the query-to-keyword relationship to be more or less relevant, a kind of volume and relevance throttle.

Today, audiences enable advertisers to target the right message to the right person — at potentially the right time — in a way that keywords cannot. Keywords can give you intent and interest levels, but search is now on the cusp of something greater: the ability to create campaigns to specifically meet customers, wherever they are.

Just as exciting, we can use audiences to help us stop wasting digital marketing spend… and those audiences don’t have to be limited to users who have engaged with us from a search standpoint.

Could all search campaigns be remarketing campaigns?

I’ve been noodling on the idea for a while that all campaigns are remarketing campaigns. You might disagree with me, especially since Bing only allows a -90-percent bid modifier. But… a -90-percent bid modifier is still fairly close to creating an exclusion or a negative campaign.

Why is this important? It gives you the ability to segment your customers, adjust your bid strategy to reduce acquisition costs and adjust your messaging based on the audience segment.

Consider this scenario:

In the paid search brand campaigns I managed, I noticed that over time, my CPAs were steadily increasing. Using analytics to investigate, I found that there were a lot of return visitors on our brand keywords. I was paying to re-engage existing customers who were lazy and clicking on my paid search ads to navigate to the site or get a specific offer/deal instead of navigating through organic links or going directly to the website.

This, in conjunction with more competition bidding on my brand keywords, was causing my CPCs and my CPA to increase. My goal was to decrease my CPA and CPC and target net new customers to increase our overall awareness.

I decided to segment the brand campaign into two groups:

• Engaged Visitors. Site visitors from the last 30 days who didn’t bounce right away, purchasers, visitors who touched other high-cost channels.
• Net-new or Low Engagement Visitors. Visitors who haven’t been to the site in more than 30 days, visitors who bounced within x seconds in the last 30 days and people who haven’t been to my site.

Each group had different bid strategies and messaging.

With the Engaged Visitor segment, I reduced my bids, allowing my ads to go into a lower position, knowing that I ranked well organically. I also adjusted my messaging to our existing customers to not promote discounts/sales.

For the Net-new and Low Engagement Visitors, I did the inverse, increasing bids to make sure I was in prominent positioning with value-based customer messaging.

Making these adjustments, I was able to decrease my CPA for existing customers. And by focusing less on discount or promotional messaging to existing customers, I wasn’t paying to reacquire them every time they wanted to make a transaction. Instead, I could focus on building a new customer base that had a higher lifetime value to my client’s business.

Asking the right questions

I was able to use remarketing because I started to think more strategically about how I was targeting different customer segments.

Think about what other questions you can ask to segment out consumers and what you might do differently in terms of bidding, targeted keywords (head vs. tail) and the overall messaging (ad copy, ad extensions) and user experience. Learn to ask the right questions so you can develop remarketing strategies that align to your business goals.

Ask questions like:

• Would you create different user experience for new vs. existing customers?
• Has a customer been to your website previously?
• Have they engaged through other high-cost channels?
• Have they engaged multiple times across multiple marketing channels?

If you are strategic and smart about the questions you ask, you might change your perspective about how you use audiences and RLSA to make your search campaigns more effective.

Be customer-obsessed

There are a million ways to segment your search campaigns based on audiences — and they all lead to better experiences for your customers. But by using audiences to segment users and create custom messaging and experiences for specific audiences, you will dramatically increase the scale and size of your search marketing campaigns.

Of course, there is a cost associated with managing this; but in most cases, changing your bid strategies or re-attracting and engaging with consumers who are more likely to convert will lead to both campaign spend savings and higher-value relationships with your customers.

Mind blown? It’s because you’re searching for an audience that is using keywords, not just keywords themselves. The new world of search means putting the customer (audience) first and trying to create a great user experience specifically for them.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/searching-for-searchers-audiences-are-the-new-keywords-247757

Google adds Merchant Center Feed Rules to make formatting shopping feeds easier

A self-service tool to fix errors, add custom labels and more right in Merchant Center.

Let’s face it, shopping feeds are a pain. Such a pain that an entire cottage industry has sprung up to help retailers with the nuisance of product feed formatting and management. On Tuesday, Google released Feed Rules to make it a little easier for those advertisers and retailers managing Google Shopping feeds on their own to get feed data formatted correctly.

“You can export and submit your product data in your own format, and use different rules to transform it into product attributes and values that follow the Google Shopping feed specification, directly in Merchant Center,” Sven Herschel, product manager for Google Shopping, explained in ablog post.

From the new Feed rules tab in Merchant Center, you can now set rules to change column headers and values used in your product data to match those used by Google — e.g., “for women” to “female” as shown in the screenshot from Google below.

Additionally, you can add missing attributes by setting rules that can automatically populate missing fields with a fixed value or different values based on certain conditions.

Once you’ve got your data all set, then you can use Feed Rules to apply custom labels to products and tag products with shipping labels.

Herschel adds that this is just version 1 of Feed Rules, and Google will be looking for feedback on the feature and suggestions for additional capabilities. Select “Send Feedback” on the gear icon in Merchant Center to send Google your thoughts.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-shopping-feed-rules-248235

Google “Pigeon” Updates Local Search Algorithm With Stronger Ties To Web Search Signal

Google has released a new algorithm to provide a more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. The changes will be visible within the Google Maps search results and Google Web search results.

Note: We’ve named this update the Pigeon update.

The core changes are behind the scenes, but it does impact local search results rankings and some local businesses may notice an increase or decrease in web site referrals, leads and business from the change.

Google told us that the new local search algorithm ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search along with search features such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms and more.

In addition, Google said that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.

The new algorithm is currently rolling out for US English results and aims to provide a more useful and relevant experience for searchers seeking local results. Google didn’t share any details about if and when the update would roll out more widely in other countries and languages.

Google has not commented on the percent of queries impacted by this algorithm update, nor if certain web spam algorithms were deployed in this update.

If you have noticed any ranking changes and referral changes for your local business, please let us know in the comments.

source: http://searchengineland.com/google-makes-significant-changes-local-search-ranking-algorithm-197778

What Is The Google Pigeon Update?

Google: Pigeon Update 

Launched on July 24, 2014 for U.S. English results, the “Pigeon Update” is a new algorithm to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. Google stated that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.

source: http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm-updates

Google: Algorithm Updates

Google has a long history of famous algorithm updates, search index changes and refreshes.

Below are links to some of the most important resources for search marketers:

Google has a long history of famous algorithm updates, search index changes and refreshes.
Below are links to some of the most important resources for search marketers:

• Google Hummingbird
• Google Mobile Friendly Update
• Google Panda Update
• Google Penguin Update
• Google Pigeon Update
• Google Payday Update
• Google Pirate Update
• Google EMD (Exact Match Domain) Update
• Google Top Heavy Update

Source: http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm-updates

Google makes 2 ad updates that will affect local search marketers

Ads now appear in Local Finder results, plus ads display differently in Google Maps.

 

Google has made changes this week to local search results and Google Maps that will impact retailers and service providers with physical locations.

Ads in Local Finder results

Local SEO specialist Brian Barwig was among those who have noticed the ads appearing in the Local Finder results — reached after clicking “More places” from a local three-pack in the main Google search results.

The addition of the ads (more than one ad can display) in the Local Finder results means retailers and service providers that aren’t featured in the local three-pack have a new way of getting to the top of the results if users click through to see more listings. (It also means another haven for organic listings has been infiltrated with advertising.)

The ads in the Local Finder rely on AdWords location extensions just like Google Maps, which started featuring ads that used location extensions when Google updated Maps in 2013. Unlike the results in Maps, however, advertisers featured in Local Finder results do not get a pin on the map results.

A Google spokesperson didn’t offer further details other than to say, “We’re always testing out new formats for local businesses, but don’t have any additional details to share for now.”

  

Google Maps is no longer considered a Search Partner

Google has also announced changes to how ads display in Google Maps. Soon, Google will only show ads that include location extensions in Maps; regular text ads will not be featured. The other big change is that Google Maps is no longer considered part of Search Partners. Google has alerted advertisers, and Maps has been removed from the list of Google sites included in Search Partners in the AdWords help pages.

This change in Maps’ status means:

1. Advertisers that use location extensions but had opted out of Search Partners will now be able to have their ads shown in Maps and may see an increase in impressions and clicks as their ads start showing there.

2. Advertisers that don’t use location extensions but were opted into Search Partners could see a drop in impressions and clicks with ads no longer showing in Maps.

The move to include Maps as part of Google search inventory will mean more advertisers will be included in Maps ad auctions. The emphasis on location extensions is in line with Google’s increasing reliance on structured data and feeds, as retailers participating in Google Shopping can attest.

source: http://searchengineland.com/google-ads-local-finder-results-maps-not-search-partner-247779