Google places has always used some form of automation to pull in citations that are located out on the web. Well, I have witnessed that for quite some time anyway. This can be a great practice when we need to gather as much data as possible. Sometimes however this can really lead to issues.
Recently I had a client that decided to change their business address and business name. The business maintained the same type of service and only changed the name slightly due to a partnership change (LLC etc.). With that change I went into the verified Google Places account for said client and updated the business name and address to reflect the new updates. You would think this should be a good standard practice as I am promoting accurate content.
Within 2 weeks of this update I had noticed the clients local positioning had dropped off. This made me dig in and notice that Google Places had actually created a duplicate Google Places listing for said client with the old business information. This duplicate listing had impacted the results of the claimed listing. Under further examination it was determined that Google Places had automatically created a new listing with the old information due to many citations still existing on the web with that information.
This now creates a huge problem because a few side effects were felt and will continue to be felt.
1. We dropped in the local results
2. Google Places automatically made this change because more citations exist for the old incorrect address
3. Google Places will continue to support the old business information until I update ALL old citations with new ones (possibly 100′s)
4. Google’s report a problem tool barely ever works, but I will try to tell Google this is a duplicate anyway
5. Any many other issues …
The summary seems to be that the automated system will continue to inaccurate skew my manually updated data until I can force the automated system to see the new information. I feel like this is a flawed system. Being the verified owner, I should be able to say “hey, my address changed”.
My question is,
… is the MorningStar Ministries Heritage Towers reservation a scam? It seems as if Morningstar Ministries is attempting to take reservations to reserve a homesite in the Old Heritage Towers that used to once be PTL. They seem to be promoting a restoration of the towers and have been discussing this for months, yet nothing is being done. Here is additional information on the MorningStar Ministries Towers: http://towerlife.org/.
What is really interesting is all the Regent Park residence (in Fort Mill, SC) want the tower demolished do to hazards and being a huge eye sore. Additional information from the residence views can be found here at this facebook group specifically for the towers “Tear Down the MorningStar Tower”: http://www.facebook.com/groups/103986112983510/.
I am curious what others think of this. It sure does look like a scam, just as it was over 30 years ago when 100′s of people put down deposits on tower timeshares, which ultimately became a scam. More information on this here Jim Bakker – Wikipedia.
Here is the actual link where they are trying to collect $1,000 for each tower reservation:
http://morningstarministries.org/Shop/Sections/Items/Item.aspx?item_id=1000015147
So, do you think MorningStar Ministries Heritage Towers of Fort Mill, South Carolina is a Scam?
Pulled from the 2011 SEOmoz search engine rankings factors I felt it was important to emphasize this chart (Domain Level Keyword Usage – Correlated Data).
The data is generated based on opinions from 132 different SEO’s. The chart represents the average of these opinions from most important to least important. It is important to note that even though domain level keyword usage has decreased from year to year, there is still a lot of weight on exact match keyword domain. It is also surprising to me that the second highest value comes from a domain name with the keyword phrase in the actual domain i.e. keywordsomething.com. Thoughts on this data? I am curious to hear what others think.
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Doing some random searches this evening I was delighted to see the agency I work for ranking very well in Google search. When I say very well I am referring to www.ephricon.com ranking for national searches related to seo and internet marketing. That is very strong!
A search on Google for “seo agency” and “seo company” produced a #4/#5 ranking out of 75 million results roughly. It doesn’t get a whole lot more competitive than that.
