Whats best practice for local business that operates nationally?

November 19, 2010 , , , ,

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Whats best practice for local business that operates nationally?
Hi Duncan. This is a question about Google Places. It’s obviously a no-brainer putting up a listing in the first place, and I know When you’re operating nationally from one location you can indicate e.g. ‘up to 250 miles from Norwich’. But I have seen businesses from other areas apparently registering from fake addresses in different towns in order to look ‘local’ and to move up the rankings accordingly. These listings carry links that all go back to the same web site, not only boosting ‘local’ credibility on searches but I’d guess also increasing the sheer volume of authoritative links to the firm in question indexed by Google.

Presumably this practice is frowned on by Google. Are there any legit alternative strategies? Or should a firm consider ditching its scruples and going with this rather unseemly approach?

Laurence Menear – –

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  • http://new.yodelay.com/dev Duncan Johnson

    Good question Laurence,

    Getting loads of Google Places listings isn’t going to boost your InBound link profile. Google will easily be able to work that one out.

    Those companies that are putting in loads of fake addresses will end up eventually having them all removed. Guaranteed, just a matter of time.

    Yodelay had a couple of Places listings I put in myself. I admit to playing around a little bit but it wasn’t my intention on trying to double up my listings, just my contact info. As a result I ended up with 2 Places listings for particular search terms.

    It lasted for a couple of months before one of the listings was removed.

    My advice is if you want to do it legitimately, as a franchise might, then you simply need to register separate business addresses and separate phone numbers for every location. You don’t even need to register landlines… mobiles will do.

    You could set a load of fake Google accounts but the time and effort it would take to do this might not outweigh the benefits. Also you can rest assured if/when the administrators of Places find the dodgy listings then you will receive a little more than a removal of the fake listings.

    Check their T&C’s.

    I know Google can check the duplication of phone numbers pretty easily… not sure the same can be said about postal addresses… so I’m pretty certain that you could fake a load of addresses and as long as you had access to a load of mobiles you could do this… I don’t recommend it though

    Keep your scruples!

    Focus on getting people to review your site/services from the review sites you can see your competition has had reviews from.

    Hope that helps.

    Duncan