Unit # No Longer Showing On Google Places
-
We've noticed that the unit # is no longer showing on a clients Places profile page. Any thoughts on why and if relevant to rankings?
Places page - https://skitch.com/kyegrace/8fimr/vuppie-real-estate-team
or
and as it appears in the backend https://skitch.com/kyegrace/8fimk/google-places-analytics
Any insight greatly appreciated!
-
From Chris Silversmith on Twitter:
Google Places tries to normalize addresses to display. Suite #s often not necessry to find locations so they often leave out.
-
Hello Kye,
So glad this has gotten you off to a good start.
I should add, if you do end up needing to go start a Google forum thread on this....big news today. Google has just launched their NEW forum:
http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/maps
All local SEOs and local business owners: update your bookmarks!
Miriam
-
Awesome! Thanks for the great response. I'll dive into it in more depth shortly but I think you have likely covered off a ton of great avenues.
I'll let you know what I find with each of your suggestions and/or questions.
Thanks again!
-
Hi Kye,
Thanks so much for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to help you.
Just to confirm, I am seeing in your screenshots and link 2 variants of your address:
805 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1K1 (604) 220-7490
507-805 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1K1 (604) 220-7490
I had to tap a Canadian colleague on the shoulder to confirm that this order of 507-805 is a typical format in Canada (here in the US, suite numbers always come at the end of the street address - never at the beginning). So that seems typical.
Next, in an attempt to troubleshoot this, I looked your business up on YellowPages.ca as they are Canada's major local data provider. I searched for 'Vuppie Real Estate Team Vancouver BC' but could not find your company listed there. So, that's a dead end, but also a useful note to you that your company should probably get listed there as Google Places relies heavily on that source in your country for accuracy and confirmation of data.
Next, I searched Google Maps for your phone number. It signals that there are 8 listings with that address, but , rather annoyingly, when I click the link to show me what they are, it won't show me. Can you account for 8 listings for the phone number - perhaps 1 for the office and 1 for 7 distinct partners in the realty office?
A G Maps search for your business is only turning up your one listing, so perhaps that mention of 8 listings is nonsense.
Next, I did an address search within maps for your address of 805 West Broadway
Vancouver, BC V5Z 1K1Looks like there are a ton of businesses at this address. I see:
Ainsworth Geoffrey Dr -Balevi Ben Dr -Bergman James H Dr -2 reviewsBuffets Vancouver -12 reviewsDr. Belinda Weltman - ClearView Orthodontics -Dr. E. Dwayne Karateew -1 reviewIntegral Dental Lab -Millenaar Diederik W Dr -Pharmasave -Platinum Denture Clinic -1 reviewRoss William H Dr -Taylor & Blair Personal Injury Lawyers -TD Bank Financial Group -3 reviewsTony's Coffee -1 reviewVancouver Dental Spa -2 reviewsVancouver Dentist Dr Ara Elmajian & Assoc. -Vancouver Dentist on Broadway Dr. B Kwoo -3 reviewsVancouver Hearing Centre -Vuppie Real Estate Team -9 reviewsWillow Dental Care Vancouver -10 reviewsOut of curiosity, I began mousing over these and saw that about 8/10 of the do not have suite numbers/unit numbers of any kind attached to the address. Only a few do. So that's interesting. Why is Google recognizing only a small portion of suite #s for all of these businesses? Is it because the business owners didn't realize they needed to list a suite number to differentiate themselves from other occupants of the building or because, as is the case with your listing, the number has abruptly dropped out of sight? Don't have an answer to this, but it's a good question.
Now, when an issue like this occurs, I typically run a quick search of the Google Places Help Forum to discover if there is a rash of reporting of a similar error. Again, Google drops the ball as the functionality of their search tool is down. This is the case at least 50% of the time with what should be the most useful tool for searching for common current issues.
This leaves me with two comments that may be of some or no relevance to what you are experiencing:
1. In the United States last week, a bunch of us saw our client's addresses which were formerly listed with Suite 205 or what have you change in formatting to #205. This was remarked on and we wondered if Google was experimenting with a change of the way they are handling suite numbers. I wonder if something similar could be going on in Canada and if the number has gone missing in action only temporarily? You didn't mention when this change occurred.
2. The other recent suite-number-type news is that Google just updated their Google Places Quality Guidelines to state that if you have a suite number, it needs to be listed in the second line of the address. This was a big change, and I bet many business owners have no knowledge of it. Here is a link to the guidelines where you can read the language yourself:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528
I find myself wondering what would happen if you edited your listing to include the suite number in the second address line. It might trigger re-verification which would be a pain in the neck. I wonder, too, about the fact that because it is common in Canada for such numbers to come first, your updated listing would then look funny to Canadians. So, the question really is - is it worth it to do this?
My questions for you are:
-
Have you noticed any drop in rankings?
-
How old is the listing?
-
Do you know when this change actually happened?
My one concern, really, is that the listing may become merged with any of all those other businesses showing at this address which are not differentiated by a suite number. Do your reviews look okay? Anything there that shouldn't be?
My Advice To You:
Open a thread at the Google Places Help Forum on this topic and see if you can get Vanessa to reply to it. It's a very good question and my normal methods of troubleshooting have not yielded any reliable clues. You should point out that a number of the businesses at your address are also not showing a suite number at this point and that you are concerned about a) merging and b) clients not knowing which suite to visit when they come to what must be a very busy building.
On a final side note, Kye, I would recommend an edit of your Places description. It's not considered a best practie to put geographic info in your description...Google might view it as spammy. The description currently reads:
Pete Shpak is a Top Vancouver BC Realtor/Real Estate Agent focusing on Condo and Home sales in False Creek, Yaletown, Kitsilano, Fairview, Coal Harbour, Downtown, Gastown, West End & Lower Lonsdale
I'd edit that.
Please, feel free to return to this thread with further info/questions.
Miriam
-
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
-
Google not detecting Hreflang
Hey everybody, We recently migrated our .co.uk to .com/en. Google for some reason is saying that the .com/en version has no hfrelang tags - even though they are clearly there and have had the same implementation as other language versions of the website. We also did a previous migration 6 months ago for the german version of our website and no hreflang problems there. We add our hreflang tags to our sitemap - which you can find here:
Technical SEO | | mooj
https://camaloon.com/en/web-sitemap.xml Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks 🙏0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
URL gets cut off in Google
Hi everybody, I got a question concerning my website URLs. It's a large WordPress website and we've got a lot of categorised pages ('parent' / 'child'). Now when I search for a specific page I only get to see the 'parent' name in the URL. The page which I am looking for isn't visible. Only a small arrow which shows me 2 options (in cache and compare). The URLs are not too long. Does anybody know why this happens, and how I can solve it? I added a image for reference. (Where /partners/ is the parent page and /partners/aruba/ isn't visible) Thank you very much. LSsT1Ua
Technical SEO | | SecureLink0 -
Google Enterprise Search Questions
Hi Everybody, A client has asked me to take a look at Google Enterprise Search for them. It has been a few years since I last fooled around with implementing a Google search box on a website, and that was the free version which included off-site results in the results. This appears to be the main page describing the paid product: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/ I have three questions: The search testing function on the above page doesn't seem to be working. I'm typing in a URL and search term, as prompted, and the page is simply refreshing. It never provides me an example set of results. Is it working for you? This client has a moderately large e-commerce site (about 200 products). Have you implemented Google enterprise search on such a site and are you happy with its performance? The goal here is to let users search for a topic and be returned both product and informational pages. How well does this tool do this? Am I going to need to know any special types of coding (beyond html/css) to implement this? If so, what are they? If you have experience with this product, I would surely appreciate your feedback. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | MiriamEllis0 -
Why did I drop ranking after setting up perm redirect, sitemap, and Google places??
I have a site that was ranking in the top two for my search terms. We had a funky url (it contained hyphens) and was advised to change it for SEO, so I setup a perm redirect through my web host (before it was a temporary one I think) At the same time I installed a sitemap plugin for Wordpress and also registered for a Google Places account. I can't remember the exact order I did this -- does it matter? Anyway, within a couple days of doing the above, my ranking dropped to the bottom of the second page. I would like to fix this, but I'm not sure. I need help please!
Technical SEO | | fsvatousek0 -
0 Google Backlinks
A sudden drop in the number of google backlinks. Earlier this month I had 15 google backlinks and now all of a sudden I have none. My google impression has also dropped drastically, my website's average is 10000 impression per day and now we have none. I have increased the crawler's speed on the website, would this be the cause of it? 4pmdesign.com
Technical SEO | | 4pm0 -
How to re-claim Google Places listing?
I have 2 new clients whose Google Places pages were claimed & edited by other SEO companies. No info is available to me on the Google Accounts used to claim them. Both Places listings need significant edits. Is there a way to re-claim these listings with new Google Accounts, in order to edit/optimize them? Or, do I have to create new Places listings and then ask Google to delete the old ones? This situation must be occurring every day, it seems....
Technical SEO | | DonB1 -
Google Fresh Update
Here's a question, if you put the date in your url (often a wordpress format) would that be seen by Google now as 'fresh' content? - part of their new update.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0