Google emailed to let me know the merged-with-Richland issue was being fixed. Sure enough, the Richland office now has its own listing, no sign at all of anything related to Cari’s account. Good for them.

In the meantime, I updated Cari’s business name while all this was going on. I removed “Windermere Real Estate” and replaced it with “Real Estate Agent,” which seems to have helped disassociate the listing with the Windermere office listings.

But her listing has been merged again … only not with the main Windermere office in Kennewick, and not with one of her fellow agents, but it’s been merged with two other agents in her same office. Here’s the link for the live version, and here’s a screenshot showing everything that’s screwed up with this listing. (click for larger version)

Google has Cari’s business name, street address, office phone and fax number correct. And the middle three images in the “Photos & Videos” section are hers. Yay! But the rest of the listing is a strange conglomeration of her listing with the listings that belong to two other agents in the same building: Dallas Green and Chris Powell.

It has Dallas as the main photo, and then Chris’ photo shows down below in the “Photos & Videos” section. The worst thing is that it has Chris’ mobile number, not Cari’s … ergo, no calls for her from Google Places.

There are several pieces of content not from Cari’s account, but I don’t know where they’re from: the business hours, the “Real Estate Agency” category, the description and the video down in the lower right.

As I said in the post a couple weeks ago … SIGH.

We still have some data cleanup to do on her non-Google listings, which probably still reflect the old Richland address. But, as best I can tell, that has nothing to do with this merging problem. She’s not being merged with anyone in Richland — this is a purely Kennewick address issue, and the problem is that Google still sucks at dealing with multiple business owners at the same address.

Stay tuned for the further adventures of a Google Places listing gone haywire….I’m going to go use the “Report a Problem” and troubleshooter form right now and will include a link to this post for Google’s enjoyment.

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

As Promised, Google Unmerged and Re-Merged My Wife’s Google Places Listing

Yesterday, Google emailed me to let me know that they’re going to unmerge my wife’s listing, and then re-merge it with another listing. Here’s the email, and then I’ll explain after you see it.

Isn’t that the nicest email? I’m serious – that’s exactly the kind of informative, helpful thing Google Places should be doing in its communication with small business owners.

Except that, in this case, they’re not solving anything with the listing at all. Here’s the story….

First, The Background

For those who are new to this site, my wife is a local real estate agent with Windermere Real Estate.

There are two Windermere Real Estate offices in our area. They used to be partners (same brokerage) but are now, technically, separate/competing brokerages under the Windermere name. Here are their addresses:

Windermere Real Estate Tri-Cities
329 North Kellogg Street
Kennewick, WA 99336

Windermere Group One
490 Bradley Blvd.
Richland, WA 99352

Making matters worse? Cari used to work at the Richland office, but now works in the Kennewick office.

She switched offices more than a year ago, but knowing the inherent risk in updating a Google Places listing, I refused to change the address. Too dangerous. Too many stories of disaster from a simple address change. No thanks.

Everything was fine. She was listed with the Richland address, but it used her cellphone number so any calls would still come straight to her, not to the old office.

Then, Disaster Struck

In early December, the folks at her old office in Richland finally decided to create their own Google Places listing for the brokerage. It immediately consumed my wife’s listing. They used a different business name and a different phone number than what’s in Cari’s listing; only the address was the same. But the new listing immediately took over and Cari was nowhere to be found in Google Places.

None of my attempts to unmerge the two listings were successful. I used the “Report a Problem” tool on the listing, with no luck.

Mike Blumenthal suggested I use the recently added troubleshooter tool in the Google Places Help Center. On December 27th, I went through that process, indicating that I’d already used the “Report a Problem” button. I filled-in the parts asking for her business name and address. At the bottom of the form, I explained this:

My wife’s listing has been merged with Windermere Group One at 490 Bradley Blvd., Richland, WA, 99352 — my wife used to be at that address, but is now at the Kennewick address. Her photos are showing up on the Windermere Group One Place Page, while her own Place Page no longer appears anywhere.

Google’s autoresponder contacted me almost immediately, and then about 48 hours later — during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, which is quite impressive — I got another email from Google with this message:

We have taken the necessary steps to make sure that your business information will appear correctly in 4-6 weeks.

Oh, No You Haven’t!

That was the last email I received from Google until the one that came in yesterday. In reading the latest email, you can see that Google hasn’t done anything to fix the problem. Here’s what they say the listing will look like when it’s fixed … err, “updated.”

But that’s not Cari’s listing. That’s the primary listing for the brokerage where she’s at now. It’s the same address, but the business name and phone number are the brokerage, not her. This is what Cari’s listing looks like in the Places dashboard — the basic Name, Address, Phone (NAP) data hasn’t changed in years. Notice that the business name and phone number are different.

So, Google is basically going to unmerge her listing from the Richland office, then re-merge it with the Kennewick office. She won’t have her name nor her phone number showing up; it’ll be the brokerage’s listing, not hers.

SIGH.

This is 2012. Real estate agents, doctors, dentists, lawyers, hair stylists and numerous other local businesses work in situations where multiple independent business owners share the same building and physical address.

How long do we have to wait before Google Places figures that out and stops merging these kinds of listings?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Google Emails To Let Me Know My Wife’s Merged Listing Will Be Merged Again

At first, [not provided] represented a small percentage of overall traffic to most of the sites for which I have analytics access. And then it grew. And grew. And grew.

Today, [not provided] represents about 25% of the daily referrers to this blog. But it also represents double-digit daily referrers to non-marketing/tech sites that I follow.

And maybe the most head-shaking thing of all is that, in just 2.5 months, [not provided] managed to become a Top 10 referrer for most of the sites that I monitor. Here’s a look at three.

Small Business Search Marketing

My impression is that this blog attracts a mix of marketing consultants/agencies and small business owners. In both cases, it’s probably safe to assume that many readers are Google users and also frequently logged-in to their Google accounts. The [not provided] keyword referrals bear witness to that.

Not surprisingly at all, [not provided] occupies the No. 1 spot among all keyword referrals for 2011 to this blog. That’s among almost 69,000 different keywords that sent 168,000 total natural search visits.

But lest you think that [not provided] only affected marketing/tech blogs and websites, consider this next case.

@U2

@U2 is my long-running hobby site about the rock band U2. It’s been in existence since 1995 and for at least the past 12 years has never ranked lower than third on a search for the band’s name. (It was #1 until the official site launched in 2000, and stayed #2 until the Wikipedia page overtook a couple years ago.)

@U2 had more than 1.4 million unique visitors in 2011 from all corners of the globe. It’s a very diverse site and certainly not limited to the tech crowd like my own blog is. Visitors range from teens to senior citizens (yes, we have readers in their 70s).

In 2011, natural search sent 1,763,917 visits to @U2 on 237,929 total keywords. But in just 2.5 months, [not provided] cracked the top 10 overall keywords sending traffic to the site.

Related: On the @U2 forum, which has its own subdomain (forum.atu2.com), [not provided] was No. 7 on the 2011 keyword referrer list. We also have a blog on its own domain (atu2blog.com), and [not provided] was the No. 4 “most popular keyword” during 2011.

In other words, this is not just a problem for tech/marketing sites.

Dr. Cynthia Bailey, California Dermatologist

As many of you know, one of my clients is Dr. Cynthia Bailey, a dermatologist in California. Dr. Bailey’s target audience is also not the tech/marketing crowd. Her site offers high-quality skincare products and solutions to a very mainstream audience; it skews female, but us guys have skincare needs, too!

And, much like my mainstream U2 site, [not provided] cracked Dr. Bailey’s list of the 10 most popular keywords; in her case, it was No. 2 on the list in only 2.5 months.

The Problem With [Not Provided]

In each case above, with three very different target audiences, [not provided] made up a substantial percentage of the overall search traffic to these sites — and the numbers would be higher if I only compared it to overall Google traffic.

There are ways to use analytics data to help get a general idea of who these [not provided] visitors are. Google’s own Avinash Kaushik has some ideas and examples in this excellent article.

(I should mention that next month’s SMX West conference has a panel dedicated to discussing ways to cope with this issue: Life In A [Not Provided] World.)

But you know what? I don’t use analytics for general ideas and guesswork; I use analytics for specific answers. And Google has taken away a lot of those answers.

For a number of reasons (many of which Danny Sullivan explained yesterday on Search Engine Land), the [not provided] keyword referrer is nothing short of a pain in the arse for anyone who does serious work on the web.

For me, a blogger who relies on analytics to understand what content visitors are looking for, [not provided] is more than 7,500 visits that are a mystery to me — and remember, that’s in only 2.5 months! I shudder to think what the full 2012 statistics will look like.

For someone like Dr. Bailey, [not provided] directly impacts the bottom line. She not only relies on keyword referrals to help decide what to write about on her blog, but also to understand which keywords drive online sales of skincare products. And in just 2.5 months, [not provided] was No. 2 among all keywords that directly led to online sales.

This isn’t the end of the world for Dr. Bailey, nor for me, but it’s a serious hurdle to accomplishing our website’s goals. (And it’s a slap in the face to think that Google’s paid advertisers aren’t facing the same hurdle, but that’s another post for another day.)

I’m curious: In your analytics, where did [not provided] wind up ranking among all 2011 keyword referrals? How has it impacted your website(s)?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Google’s [Not Provided]: Assessing 2.5 Months of Analytics Damage

Google: 8 Million Claimed Place Pages

Earlier this month at the ILM West conference, Google self-reported a big number: eight million claimed Place Pages. See David Mihm’s coverage and the Kelsey Group’s coverage for confirmation, as well as other Google local/mobile numbers.

Mike Blumenthal has posted about the growth of claimed Place Pages, based on what’s now three times that Google has self-reported statistics over the past 20 months. In a nutshell, the number has doubled in that time frame from four million in April 2010 to the current eight million.

Facebook: ??? Businesses with Pages

Unfortunately, the number of businesses with Facebook Pages is a mystery. Facebook isn’t saying — I’ve emailed the communications team twice in the past couple weeks and received no reply — and, to my knowledge, never has given a number.

There’ve been numerous surveys and similar attempts to guesstimate the number of small businesses with Facebook pages. Greg Sterling wrote earlier this year about one survey that said 54% of SMBs have a Facebook page. Some surveys peg the number higher, while others have it lower.

Before some of our GetListed Local University workshops, we poll attendees and ask if they have a claimed Google Place Page, if they have a Facebook page, etc. As Mike Blumenthal reported from our recent Western New York event, the numbers skewed pretty heavily toward Facebook. (Admittedly, that was a very small sample of SMBs, but my memory is that the responses always seem to reflect similar percentages.)

One of the problems with any survey, though, is the possibility (likelihood?) of mistaken self-reporting. How many SMBs who take these surveys actually have a personal Facebook profile that they use for business purposes, but don’t really have a Facebook Page?

As of 2007, the US Census Bureau estimated that there were about 27.7 million small businesses in the US. If we use the 54% statistic that I mentioned two paragraphs above, that would give a rough estimate of about 15 million SMBs with Facebook Pages.

That’s a little less than double the number of claimed Google Place Pages. I don’t really want to put a lot of stock in that but, for now, it may be the best we can do.

Your thoughts? In your experience, do more small business owners that you know have claimed Google Place Pages or a Facebook Page? (Given that a fair amount of local search folks read this blog, I’m guessing the replies will tilt towards Google more than they do in the general populace.)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Which is More: Claimed Google Place Pages or Businesses with Facebook Pages?

I implemented rel=author this summer as Google described and then waited and waited for several months until it finally kicked in for me in early October. Then it disappeared in late October for no apparent reason. And now it’s back again. Hopefully for good, because I really believe this is going to become a strong traffic driver for authors/publishers. I also think it’s a sign that an author has earned trust from Google.

My rel=author status has revolved around two sites: Search Engine Land and this site, Small Business Search Marketing. To my knowledge, the author avatar doesn’t appear on articles I’ve written at any other sites — not my personal blog, not @U2 nor its blog, etc., etc.

But now that we’ve just launched Marketing Land, and I’m doing a lot of writing there, I wanted to see if Google had picked that site up and added it to my authorship. On Tuesday night, I found a search that showed my avatar on both SEL and SBSM, but not on the new ML site.

For some reason, I had a feeling that getting Google to recognize my authorship at Marketing Land was going to be a long, frustrating process. It wasn’t. I think it was just a matter of adding Marketing Land to my Google+ profile. I added it to the “Introduction” and “Employment” sections of my profile.

I figured I might have to wait a couple weeks at minimum, but no. Not at all. I checked Wednesday afternoon and there it was: a Marketing Land article showing my author avatar, less than 24 hours after I added Marketing Land to my Google+ profile.

Disclaimer

The whole rel=author thing is somewhat of a mystery to me, and I’m not entirely sure that updating my Google+ profile is all that it took to get the avatar showing for Marketing Land articles. It could be pure coincidence that this happened the day after I updated my profile.

I guess I’ll test this theory by adding the markup to one of my other sites and then adding it to my profile. And we’ll see how long that takes. I’m betting it’ll be a lot longer than the next day.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Adding a New Site to Google’s Rel=Author Markup? Faster Than Expected

Have a look at this screenshot of a recent search for [u2 i believe in father christmas]:

First of all, Google, what’s up with giving a file-sharing site such high visibility? (Google’s been under a fair amount of pressure to fight online piracy and has already removed some such terms from its autocomplete and Google Instant tools.)

Second of all, Google, that site in the second position is pulling the wool over your eyes. As you can pretty much tell from the screengrab, there’s not really a video on the landing page. I don’t want to link to it, but here’s the URL if you want to cut-and-paste:

www.4shared.com/audio/zlxhw3Q0/U2_-_I_Believe_in_Father_Chris.html

If you check it out, you’ll find that the “video” is really just one of those screensaver-type things that shows color patterns on a black background. Like this:

Now, I understand that, as far as Googlebot is concerned — that’s a video. Googlebot has no way to actually watch the video. It just knows that there’s a video file embedded there. And I also know that this song is something of an outlier; it was only sold for a limited time to raise funds for (RED) in late 2008. So there’s not a ton of results to go along with this song.

But still, Google … is it really that easy to rank at the top of page one? Just find a fairly non-competitive query, post a non-video on the page, and …. BAM! Instant SEO win for a site offering a song for free. Illegally.

It should be harder to rank in Google’s universal results than that.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

It Should Be Harder To Rank In Google’s Universal Results Than This