Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Monday, December 18, 2017
Kaspersky Lab sues Trump administration over U.S. government ban
Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!
(Reuters) — Moscow-based security software maker Kaspersky Lab said on Monday it has asked a U.S. federal court to overturn a Trump administration ban on use of its products in government networks, saying the move deprived the company of due process.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in September issued a directive ordering civilian government agencies to remove Kaspersky software from their networks within 90 days. It came amid mounting concern among U.S. officials that the software could enable Russian espionage and threaten national security.
The appeal is part of an ongoing campaign by Kaspersky to refute allegations the company is vulnerable to Kremlin influence. The company has repeatedly denied it has ties to any government and said it would not help a government with cyber espionage.
“DHS has harmed Kaspersky Lab’s reputation and its commercial operations without any evidence of wrongdoing by the company,” the company’s founder, Eugene Kaspersky, said in an open letter to the Homeland Security agency published on Monday.
The department did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit alleges that the government largely relied on uncorroborated news media reports as evidence in a review of Kaspersky software. It asks the court to overturn the ban and also declare that the Russian company’s products do not pose a security threat to U.S. government computers.
The value of Kaspersky’s software sales to the U.S. government totaled less than $54,000, or about 0.03 percent of its U.S. subsidiary’s sales in the United States, according to the complaint.
Still, the allegations about the software have hurt its much bigger consumer software business, prompting retailers such as Best Buy Co to pull Kaspersky products.
Kaspersky said in October that it would submit the source code of its software and future updates for inspection by independent parties. U.S. officials have said that step, while welcome, would not be sufficient.
The September DHS order applied only to civilian government agencies and not the Pentagon. U.S. intelligence agencies said earlier this year that Kaspersky products were already generally not allowed on military networks.
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Sea of Thieves developer Rare explains how the game and its progression works
Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!
Sea of Thieves is one of Microsoft’s biggest upcoming games, and now developer Rare is finally explaining its structure. The online multiplayer pirate sim has pleasantly surprised us with its humor, collaborative interactions, and water physics the last couple of times we’ve seen it, but no one has ever explained to us what our goal is on the high seas. But now, Rare wants players to know that it has thought a lot about that, and it is sharing details about the progression system that will serve as the primary motivator during your time with Sea of Thieves when it launches in 2018 for PC and Xbox One.
“Becoming a Pirate Legend is the core objective of Sea of Thieves, and players can build their legend by accruing reputation for their exploits and adventures,” Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate wrote in a blog post.
Sea of Thieves is an online world similar to games like Destiny. You and your band of ocean criminals will take on missions in an effort to improve your infamy. Those missions will come primarily in the form of interactions with computer-controlled trading companies. These groups all have competing interests, and you can choose which ones you want to help.
“These trading companies offer quests for players to pursue, offering successful brigands reputation and gold as well as improved titles, ranks, and cosmetic items used to represent themselves to friends and foes,” reads Neate’s blog. “As players progress within a trading company, they earn access to more varied and unique quests that promise unforgettable adventures and rewards. Once players build their reputation with each trading company, they will unlock their status as a Pirate Legend.”
Sea of Thieves is still in a closed testing phase. Rare will expand that in 2018 before fully releasing the game for everyone.
Protecting your game from cyber attacks (VB Live)
Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!
VB LIVE:
The video game industry is being targeted more than ever by cyber attacks, taking massive financial and reputational hits every day. But there are increasingly sophisticated ways to lock out the hackers, keep your users safe, and your intellectual property secure. Catch up on this VB Live event to learn more!
Access this VB Live event on demand right here for free.
Hackers go where the money is — and right now, the games industry is booming. In 2017, the global games market generated $116 billion in revenue – with 43 percent of that, or $50.4 billion, coming from mobile games. Developers are finding themselves more and more vulnerable to concentrated attacks which have increasingly far-reaching consequences, say Ryan Safarian, VP of engineering at JumpRamp Games and Arash S.Haghighi, manager of infrastructure at Smilegate West.
The hidden consequences
“The revenue impact [of cyber attacks], depending on who you ask, is always going to be the biggest risk to any of your business,” Safarian says. “And there’s major impact to your hardcore players who are dedicated, whose trust you’ve earned.”
It’s far more cost effective to retain rather than acquire brand-new users. To keep your core user base satisfied, you’ve got to ensure that their session and their app is completely unmolested, and they have a very steady and consistent experience. Any disruption is going to send them screaming out the door.
“Of course you’ll have players and customers complaining, and it’s really dangerous for your business,” Haghighi adds. “If compensation comes from your competitors, or they convince your users they’re safer, then your users will go to them.”
But the new user acquisition funnel is going to be hit hard as well, and that’s often the trickiest, and most expensive, impact to bounce back from. Very few games have that sweet viral pull, which means you’re constantly purchasing and acquiring new users from various different pipelines.
In the wake of a cyber attack, the revenue impact on new user acquisition is profound, Safarian explains.
“When an attack occurs, you have to suspend your new user acquisition funnels, which immediately throws off all your third-party analytics and data,” he says. “If your application is at a standstill, or it’s at a halt, you’re now essentially triggering off a series of events that will take a long time to recover from.”
When conversion rates completely dip, you sink way down on the chart immediately — and regaining your original numbers is an incredibly expensive uphill battle.
The loss or exposure of personal information is also a huge danger, both in terms of reputation and the risk you expose your company to, Haghighi says. Hackers can leak that information, opening you up to lawsuits, or use that information as leverage against your company.
But there’s also a deeper business impact, as far as third-party relationships. JumpRamp, for example, has relationships with Hasbro and MLBPA, which require specific efforts to secure and protect the storage and transmission of personal identifiable information.
“If there’s any kind of misstep, all of a sudden that relationship dissolves,” Safarian says. “It’s a major detriment to that contract.”
Can they be stopped?
Are cyber attacks preventable?
“That’s a loaded question,” says Safarian. “I’m just going to flat out say no, you can’t prevent it. If you have any endpoint, any API, whether it be restful or not, you are essentially available for an attack. There’s a liability there. There’s always going to be a bad actor out there that’s going to try to attack your system, so you can’t prevent it, in my opinion.”
“Security’s not 100 percent,” Haghighi adds, “which means that even if you try to protect as much as you can, there are always new ways, new technologies, and new areas to leak. It will happen.”
But that doesn’t mean an attack will — or should be able to — bring you down, they both say.
The most critical steps are to lessen your attack surface area, use best practices, build guard rails around your most critical systems, and power-up your threat detection.
That means that you have to know your game architecture, Haghighi says. You have to know your service architecture, and your organization architecture, and working data flow.
You particularly need to keep an eye on your ingress and your egress, Safarian says. You want to get a solid understanding of what your activity cycle looks like over a set period of time, as defined by your business, whether it be a session, a day, a week, a month, and so on. What are your peaks? What are your valleys? What do things look like over the course of a typical day?
That offers a powerful baseline to work from, they explain, enabling you to build predictions around what legit activity looks like, and flagging hostile actions immediately.
“At the end of the day, you don’t know what you don’t know,” Safarian says. “The more detail that you have around the transactions that are going in and out of your system, the more educated and the more prepared you’re going to be to detect these attacks and defend against them.”
For more in-depth discussion and insight from digital security experts on how to shore up your attack detection, ensure hackers aren’t successful, and reassure your users that they’re safe, don’t miss this VB Live event!
You’ll learn about:
- How to prevent data breaches, SQL injections, cross-site scripting, remote file inclusion, and other cyberattacks.
- Integrating cloud and on-premises solutions
- How to handle larger, Internet-scale attacks
- Preventing the reputation hit that hacked accounts or downed sites bring
Speakers:
- Ryan Safarian, VP Engineering, JumpRamp Games
- Arash S.Haghighi, Manager of Infrastructure, Smilegate West
- Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer, GamesBeat, VentureBeat
- Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat
Sponsored by: Akamai
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Moz the Monster: Anatomy of an (Averted) Brand Crisis
Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!
Posted by Dr-Pete
On the morning of Friday, November 10, we woke up to the news that John Lewis had launched an ad campaign called "Moz the Monster". If you're from the UK, John Lewis needs no introduction, but for our American audience, they're a high-end retail chain that's gained a reputation for a decade of amazing Christmas ads.
It's estimated that John Lewis spent upwards of £7m on this campaign (roughly $9.4M). It quickly became clear that they had organized a multi-channel effort, including a #mozthemonster Twitter campaign.
From a consumer perspective, Moz was just a lovable blue monster. From the perspective of a company that has spent years building a brand, John Lewis was potentially going to rewrite what "Moz" meant to the broader world. From a search perspective, we were facing a rare possibility of competing for our own brand on Google results if this campaign went viral (and John Lewis has a solid history of viral campaigns).
Step #1: Don't panic
At the speed of social media, it can be hard to stop and take a breath, but you have to remember that that speed cuts both ways. If you're too quick to respond and make a mistake, that mistake travels at the same speed and can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating exactly the disaster you feared.
The first step is to get multiple perspectives quickly. I took to Slack in the morning (I'm two hours ahead of the Seattle team) to find out who was awake. Two of our UK team (Jo and Eli) were quick to respond, which had the added benefit of getting us the local perspective.
Collectively, we decided that, in the spirit of our TAGFEE philosophy, a friendly monster deserved a friendly response. Even if we chose to look at it purely from a pragmatic, tactical standpoint, John Lewis wasn't a competitor, and going in metaphorical guns-blazing against a furry blue monster and the little boy he befriended could've been step one toward a reputation nightmare.
Step #2: Respond (carefully)
In some cases, you may choose not to respond, but in this case we felt that friendly engagement was our best approach. Since the Seattle team was finishing their first cup of coffee, I decided to test the waters with a tweet from my personal account:
I've got a smaller audience than the main Moz account, and a personal tweet as the west coast was getting in gear was less exposure. The initial response was positive, and we even got a little bit of feedback, such as suggestions to monitor UK Google SERPs (see "Step #3").
Our community team (thanks, Tyler!) quickly followed up with an official tweet:
While we didn't get direct engagement from John Lewis, the general community response was positive. Roger Mozbot and Moz the Monster could live in peace, at least for now.
Step #3: Measure
There was a longer-term fear – would engagement with the Moz the Monster campaign alter Google SERPs for Moz-related keywords? Google has become an incredibly dynamic engine, and the meaning of any given phrase can rewrite itself based on how searchers engage with that phrase. I decided to track "moz" itself across both the US and UK.
In that first day of the official campaign launch, searches for "moz" were already showing news ("Top Stories") results in the US and UK, with the text-only version in the US:
...and the richer Top Stories carousel in the UK:
The Guardian article that announced the campaign launch was also ranking organically, near the bottom of page one. So, even on day one, we were seeing some brand encroachment and knew we had to keep track of the situation on a daily basis.
Just two days later (November 12), Moz the Monster had captured four page-one organic results for "moz" in the UK (at the bottom of the page):
While it still wasn't time to panic, John Lewis' campaign was clearly having an impact on Google SERPs.
Step #4: Surprises
On November 13, it looked like the SERPs might be returning to normal. The Moz Blog had regained the Top Stories block in both US and UK results:
We weren't in the clear yet, though. A couple of days later, a plagiarism scandal broke, and it was dominating the UK news for "moz" by November 18:
This story also migrated into organic SERPs after The Guardian published an op-ed piece. Fortunately for John Lewis, the follow-up story didn't last very long. It's an important reminder, though, that you can't take your eyes off of the ball just because it seems to be rolling in the right direction.
Step #5: Results
It's one thing to see changes in the SERPs, but how was all of this impacting search trends and our actual traffic? Here's the data from Google Trends for a 4-week period around the Moz the Monster launch (2 weeks on either side):
The top graph is US trends data, and the bottom graph is UK. The large spike in the middle of the UK graph is November 10, where you can see that interest in the search "moz" increased dramatically. However, this spike fell off fairly quickly and US interest was relatively unaffected.
Let's look at the same time period for Google Search Console impression and click data. First, the US data (isolated to just the keyword "moz"):
There was almost no change in impressions or clicks in the US market. Now, the UK data:
Here, the launch spike in impressions is very clear, and closely mirrors the Google Trends data. However, clicks to Moz.com were, like the US market, unaffected. Hindsight is 20/20, and we were trying to make decisions on the fly, but the short-term shift in Google SERPs had very little impact on clicks to our site. People looking for Moz the Monster and people looking for Moz the search marketing tool are, not shockingly, two very different groups.
Ultimately, the impact of this campaign was short-lived, but it is interesting to see how quickly a SERP can rewrite itself based on the changing world, especially with an injection of ad dollars. At one point (in UK results), Moz the Monster had replaced Moz.com in over half (5 of 8) page-one organic spots and Top Stories – an impressive and somewhat alarming feat.
By December 2, Moz the Monster had completely disappeared from US and UK SERPs for the phrase "moz". New, short-term signals can rewrite search results, but when those signals fade, results often return to normal. So, remember not to panic and track real, bottom-line results.
Your crisis plan
So, how can we generalize this to other brand crises? What happens when someone else's campaign treads on your brand's hard-fought territory? Let's restate our 5-step process:
(1) Remember not to panic
The very word "crisis" almost demands panic, but remember that you can make any problem worse. I realize that's not very comforting, but unless your office is actually on fire, there's time to stop and assess the situation. Get multiple perspectives and make sure you're not overreacting.
(2) Be cautiously proactive
Unless there's a very good reason not to (such as a legal reason), it's almost always best to be proactive and respond to the situation on your own terms. At least acknowledge the situation, preferably with a touch of humor. These brand intrusions are, by their nature, high profile, and if you pretend it's not happening, you'll just look clueless.
(3) Track the impact
As soon as possible, start collecting data. These situations move quickly, and search rankings can change overnight in 2017. Find out what impact the event is really having as quickly as possible, even if you have to track some of it by hand. Don't wait for the perfect metrics or tracking tools.
(4) Don't get complacent
Search results are volatile and social media is fickle – don't assume that a lull or short-term change means you can stop and rest. Keep tracking, at least for a few days and preferably for a couple of weeks (depending on the severity of the crisis).
(5) Measure bottom-line results
As the days go by, you'll be able to more clearly see the impact. Track as deeply as you can – long-term rankings, traffic, even sales/conversions where necessary. This is the data that tells you if the short-term impact in (3) is really doing damage or is just superficial.
The real John Lewis
Finally, I'd like to give a shout-out to someone who has felt a much longer-term impact of John Lewis' succesful holiday campaigns. Twitter user and computer science teacher @johnlewis has weathered his own brand crisis year after year with grace and humor:
So, a hat-tip to John Lewis, and, on behalf of Moz, a very happy holidays to Moz the Monster!
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Monday, December 11, 2017
Game Boss interview: New CEO Pete Hawley will focus Telltale on its core strengths
Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!
Pete Hawley joined Telltale Games as its new CEO a couple of months ago, and he is coming up for air to talk about it.
Five years ago, Telltale had its breakout hit with The Walking Dead: Season One. The game was a gut-wrenching tale that forced players to make choices about who to save or who to abandon to the zombie horde. Under founders Dan Connors and Kevin Bruner, Telltale started taking on a load of new games. It expanded to more than 350 employees and started working on titles such as Batman: The Enemy Within, Minecraft: Story Mode, Game of Thrones, and others.
During 2017, the company published 17 episodes across all of its franchises. But not every one of those was as polished as it could be. Hawley has decided to scale back, take more time on each game, and focus on fewer titles. The company laid off about 90 of its employees, or about 25 percent of the staff, shrinking down the total to about 250.
Hawley, a former Zynga executive and cofounder of Red Robot Labs, replaced Dan Connors, who cofounded the company in 2004 along with Kevin Bruner and Troy Molander. Connors remains on the board, and has advised Hawley on the tasks ahead as Telltale strives to be the big proponent of dramatic stories in games.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: Pete Hawley is CEO of Telltale Games
GamesBeat: Do you want to go over what’s happened since you joined Telltale?
Pete Hawley: I joined two months ago. It’s been five years now since Walking Dead season one, which was an enormous hit for the company. We went on to do Minecraft, another giant hit. But from that success and that player base, how much people loved the company — through that revenue the company grew and grew. Pretty much doubled in size in the last couple of years. This year we released 17 episodes, which is a pretty phenomenal effort. Each episode is around two hours long. For a relatively small company that’s an insane amount of content.
One of the challenges over the last few years, as the company doubled in size and the amount of product going out increased exponentially — we just took our eye off the ball on innovation and quality. Before I took the job, the first thing I did was go on forums and app stores and try to get an idea of the voice of our players. It was clear that our games had become fairly predictable. The formula is loved, but it’s getting old. It’s time for us to innovate, get back to our roots, and do a much better job with fewer games.
We made the decision, going into 2018, that it’s better for us to get to three games next year and do our very best work again. Give ourselves some breathing room, time, space, get back to some real innovations. We’re closing the Walking Dead storyline with season four. We want to get back to our best with that. That’s coming in the summer. We’ll close out Batman in the first half of next year. We have a new IP that I can’t announce yet, but we’re really excited about it. We’re doing that for Q4.
We’ll do a better job on quality and innovation, as well as more platform-specific work on mobile, PS4, PC. More international distribution and better marketing. We just need time and space to do a great job of that. Restructure and reimagine ourselves a little. Unfortunately that came down to a layoff of 25 percent of our workforce, but now we’re down to our best bets, our best games, and our best people.
GamesBeat: When you decided to do the layoff, were you cutting some projects that were in a dubious state?
Hawley: No, no. There was certainly more on the slate for the 2018, but we just moved some things around as opposed to cancelling anything. Give the smaller teams a long time to get things right. I didn’t come in and cancel much. It’s just that if we’re going to do a great job with things, we need more time to do that. I don’t think we’ll do service to our players or ourselves by trying to squeeze all this into 2018. Clearly, the last two years, the idea that increasing the amount of product and the episode count doesn’t work. It’s never worked. The idea that you have one or two hits and then scale your business and hope that continues — in the end, if you don’t innovate, it stops.
Above: Batman: The Enemy Within is one of Telltale’s new hits.
GamesBeat: I don’t know if Telltale has had what you would call an engine, but it’s had that same sort of choice-driven gameplay with a comic-book style, going back for years now. At one point it did seem like that was fairly innovative, but it often came with some cost to it as far as interactivity. Is that the thing that players have gotten tired of? Have you re-used that particular format a little too often, across too many games? What were some conclusions you had?
Hawley: There’s a couple of things that come to mind. One is, over the last couple of years — to some extent we’ve moved away from some of the magic of season one of Walking Dead. That real player agency and interactivity, that real sense of consequences has moved away. We’ve moved more toward pure narrative and let go of some of the — whether you call it gameplay, or just interactivity and engagement, we’ve actually moved away from it.
In many ways it’s not about changing who we are. It’s just getting back to what we did incredibly well in season one, plus more. We’re doing some great work for season four, which might surprise a few people. We’re taking the game and the gameplay in some different directions. But in the end, the company’s reputation and the love our players have for us because of what we do—I’m not here to turn this into a one-game MMO shop. We don’t have Blizzard envy. We’re storytellers.
In the future we’d like to innovate away from the four-choice wheel, but for now it’s what we do, it’s what people love, and it’s what people are asking us for, to get back to our best, and to ship and produce software that’s of high quality. Not just gameplay, but also no crashes, no glitches, really focus on the quality of the overall product. It’s not about a reinvention. It’s about getting back to doing our best work with our best people.
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Not-Actually-the-Best Local SEO Practices
Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!
Posted by MiriamEllis
It’s never fun being the bearer of bad news.
You’re on the phone with an amazing prospect. Let’s say it’s a growing appliance sales and repair provider with 75 locations in the western US. Your agency would absolutely love to onboard this client, and the contact is telling you, with some pride, that they’re already ranking pretty well for about half of their locations.
With the right strategy, getting them the rest of the way there should be no problem at all.
But then you notice something, and your end of the phone conversation falls a little quiet as you click through from one of their Google My Business listings in Visalia to Streetview and see… not a commercial building, but a house. Uh-oh. In answer to your delicately worded question, you find out that 45 of this brand’s listings have been built around the private homes of their repairmen — an egregious violation of Google’s guidelines.
“I hate to tell you this…,” you clear your throat, and then you deliver the bad news.
If you do in-house Local SEO, do it for clients, or even just answer questions in a forum, you’ve surely had the unenviable (yet vital) task of telling someone they’re “doing it wrong,” frequently after they’ve invested considerable resources in creating a marketing structure that threatens to topple due to a crack in its foundation. Sometimes you can patch the crack, but sometimes, whole edifices of bad marketing have to be demolished before safe and secure new buildings can be erected.
Here are 5 of the commonest foundational marketing mistakes I’ve encountered over the years as a Local SEO consultant and forum participant. If you run into these in your own work, you’ll be doing someone a big favor by delivering “the bad news” as quickly as possible:
1. Creating GMB listings at ineligible addresses
What you’ll hear:
“We need to rank for these other towns, because we want customers there. Well, no, we don’t really have offices there. We have P.O. Boxes/virtual offices/our employees’ houses.”
Why it’s a problem:
Google’s guidelines state:
- Make sure that your page is created at your actual, real-world location
- PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.
- Service-area businesses—businesses that serve customers at their locations—should have one page for the central office or location and designate a service area from that point.
All of this adds up to Google saying you shouldn’t create a listing for anything other than a real-world location, but it’s extremely common to see a) spammers simply creating tons of listings for non-existent locations, b) people of good will not knowing the guidelines and doing the same thing, and c) service area businesses (SABs) feeling they have to create fake-location listings because Google won’t rank them for their service cities otherwise.
In all three scenarios, the brand puts itself at risk for detection and listing removal. Google can catch them, competitors and consumers can catch them, and marketers can catch them. Once caught, any effort that was put into ranking and building reputation around a fake-location listing is wasted. Better to have devoted resources to risk-free marketing efforts that will add up to something real.
What to do about it:
Advise the SAB owner to self-report the problem to Google. I know this sounds risky, but Google My Business forum Top Contributor Joy Hawkins let me know that she’s never seen a case in which Google has punished a business that self-reported accidental spam. The owner will likely need to un-verify the spam listings (see how to do that here) and then Google will likely remove the ineligible listings, leaving only the eligible ones intact.
What about dyed-in-the-wool spammers who know the guidelines and are violating them regardless, turning local pack results into useless junk? Get to the spam listing in Google Maps, click the “Suggest an edit” link, toggle the toggle to “Yes,” and choose the radio button for spam. Google may or may not act on your suggestion. If not, and the spam is misleading to consumers, I think it’s always a good idea to report it to the Google My Business forum in hopes that a volunteer Top Contributor may escalate an egregious case to a Google staffer.
2. Sharing phone numbers between multiple entities
What you’ll hear:
“I run both my dog walking service and my karate classes out of my house, but I don’t want to have to pay for two different phone lines.”
-or-
“Our restaurant has 3 locations in the city now, but we want all the calls to go through one number for reservation purposes. It’s just easier.”
-or-
“There are seven doctors at our practice. Front desk handles all calls. We can’t expect the doctors to answer their calls personally.”
Why it’s a problem:
There are actually multiple issues at hand on this one. First of all, Google’s guidelines state:
- Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.
- Use a local phone number instead of a central, call center helpline number whenever possible.
- The phone number must be under the direct control of the business.
This rules out having the phone number of a single location representing multiple locations.
Confusing to Google
Google has also been known in the past to phone businesses for verification purposes. Should a business answer “Jim’s Dog Walking” when a Google rep is calling to verify that the phone number is associated with “Jim’s Karate Lessons,” we’re in trouble. Shared phone numbers have also been suspected in the past of causing accidental merging of Google listings, though I’ve not seen a case of this in a couple of years.
Confusing for businesses
As for the multi-practitioner scenario, the reality is that some business models simply don’t allow for practitioners to answer their own phones. Calls for doctors, dentists, attorneys, etc. are traditionally routed through a front desk. This reality calls into question whether forward-facing listings should be built for these individuals at all. We’ll dive deeper into this topic below, in the section on multi-practitioner listings.
Confusing for the ecosystem
Beyond Google-related concerns, Moz Local’s awesome engineers have taught me some rather amazing things about the problems shared phone numbers can create for citation-building campaigns in the greater ecosystem. Many local business data platforms are highly dependent on unique phone numbers as a signal of entity uniqueness (the “P” in NAP is powerful!). So, for example, if you submit both Jim’s Dog Walking and Jim’s Bookkeeping to Infogroup with the same number, Infogroup may publish both listings, but leave the phone number fields blank! And without a phone number, a local business listing is pretty worthless.
It’s because of realities like these that a unique phone number for each entity is a requirement of the Moz Local product, and should be a prerequisite for any citation building campaign.
What to do about it:
Let the business owner know that a unique phone number for each business entity, each business location, and each forward-facing practitioner who wants to be listed is a necessary business expense (and, hey, likely tax deductible, too!). Once the investment has been made in the unique numbers, the work ahead involves editing all existing citations to reflect them. The free tool Moz Check Listing can help you instantly locate existing citations for the purpose of creating a spreadsheet that details the bad data, allowing you to start correcting it manually. Or, to save time, the business owner may wish to invest in a paid, automated citation correction product like Moz Local.
Pro tip: Apart from removing local business listing stumbling blocks, unique phone numbers have an added bonus in that they enable the benefits of associating KPIs like clicks-to-call to a given entity, and existing numbers can be ported into call tracking numbers for even further analysis of traffic and conversions. You just can’t enjoy these benefits if you lump multiple entities together under a single, shared number.
3. Keyword stuffing GMB listing names
What you’ll hear:
“I have 5 locations in Dallas. How are my customers supposed to find the right one unless I add the neighborhood name to the business name on the listings?”
-or-
“We want customers to know we do both acupuncture and massage, so we put both in the listing name.”
-or-
“Well, no, the business name doesn’t actually have a city name in it, but my competitors are adding city names to their GMB listings and they’re outranking me!”
Why it’s a problem:
Long story short, it’s a blatant violation of Google’s guidelines to put extraneous keywords in the business name field of a GMB listing. Google states:
- Your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers.
- Including unnecessary information in your business name is not permitted, and could result in your listing being suspended.
What to do about it:
I consider this a genuine Local SEO toughie. On the one hand, Google’s lack of enforcement of these guidelines, and apparent lack of concern about the whole thing, makes it difficult to adequately alarm business owners about the risk of suspension. I’ve successfully reported keyword stuffing violations to Google and have had them act on my reports within 24 hours… only to have the spammy names reappear hours or days afterwards. If there’s a suspension of some kind going on here, I don’t see it.
Simultaneously, Google’s local algo apparently continues to be influenced by exact keyword matches. When a business owner sees competitors outranking him via outlawed practices which Google appears to ignore, the Local SEO may feel slightly idiotic urging guideline-compliance from his patch of shaky ground.
But, do it anyway. For two reasons:
- If you’re not teaching business owners about the importance of brand building at this point, you’re not really teaching marketing. Ask the owner, “Are you into building a lasting brand, or are you hoping to get by on tricks?” Smart owners (and their marketers) will see that it’s a more legitimate strategy to build a future based on earning permanent local brand recognition for Lincoln & Herndon, than for Springfield Car Accident Slip and Fall Personal Injury Lawyers Attorneys.
- I find it interesting that, in all of Google’s guidelines, the word “suspended” is used only a few times, and one of these rare instances relates to spamming the business title field. In other words, Google is using the strongest possible language to warn against this practice, and that makes me quite nervous about tying large chunks of reputation and rankings to a tactic against which Google has forewarned. I remember that companies were doing all kinds of risky things on the eve of the Panda and Penguin updates and they woke up to a changed webscape in which they were no longer winners. Because of this, I advocate alerting any business owner who is risking his livelihood to chancy shortcuts. Better to build things for real, for the long haul.
Fortunately, it only takes a few seconds to sign into a GMB account and remove extraneous keywords from a business name. If it needs to be done at scale for large multi-location enterprises across the major aggregators, Moz Local can get the job done. Will removing spammy keywords from the GMB listing title cause the business to move down in Google’s local rankings? It’s possible that they will, but at least they’ll be able to go forward building real stuff, with the moral authority to report rule-breaking competitors and keep at it until Google acts.
And tell owners not to worry about Google not being able to sort out a downtown location from an uptown one for consumers. Google’s ability to parse user proximity is getting better every day. Mobile-local packs prove this out. If one location is wrongly outranking another, chances are good the business needs to do an audit to discover weaknesses that are holding the more appropriate listing back. That’s real strategy - no tricks!
4. Creating a multi-site morass
What you’ll hear:
“So, to cover all 3 or our locations, we have greengrocerysandiego.com, greengrocerymonterey.com and greengrocerymendocino.com… but the problem is, the content on the three sites is kind of all the same. What should we do to make the sites different?”
-or-
“So, to cover all of our services, we have jimsappliancerepair.com, jimswashingmachinerepair.com, jimsdryerrepair.com, jimshotwaterheaterrepair.com, jimsrefrigeratorrepair.com. We’re about to buy jimsvacuumrepair.com … but the problem is, there’s not much content on any of these sites. It feels like management is getting out of hand.”
Why it’s a problem:
Definitely a frequent topic in SEO forums, the practice of relying on exact match domains (EMDs) proliferates because of Google’s historic bias in their favor. The ranking influence of EMDs has been the subject of a Google updateand has lessened over time. I wouldn’t want to try to rank for competitive terms with creditcards.com or insurance.com these days.
But if you believe EMDs no longer work in the local-organic world, read this post in which a fellow’s surname/domain name gets mixed up with a distant city name and he ends up ranking in the local packs for it! Chances are, you see weak EMDs ranking all the time for your local searches — more’s the pity. And, no doubt, this ranking boost is the driving force behind local business models continuing to purchase multiple keyword-oriented domains to represent branches of their company or the variety of services they offer. This approach is problematic for 3 chief reasons:
- It’s impractical. The majority of the forum threads I’ve encountered in which small-to-medium local businesses have ended up with two, or five, or ten domains invariably lead to the discovery that the websites are made up of either thin or duplicate content. Larger enterprises are often guilty of the same. What seemed like a great idea at first, buying up all those EMDs, turns into an unmanageable morass of web properties that no one has the time to keep updated, to write for, or to market.
- Specific to the multi-service business, it’s not a smart move to put single-location NAP on multiple websites. In other words, if your construction firm is located at 123 Main Street in Funky Town, but consumers and Google are finding that same physical address associated with fences.com, bathroomremodeling.com, decks.com, and kitchenremodeling.com, you are sowing confusion in the ecosystem. Which is the authoritative business associated with that address? Some business owners further compound problems by assuming they can then build separate sets of local business listings for each of these different service-oriented domains, violating Google’s guidelines, which state:
Do not create more than one page for each location of your business.
The whole thing can become a giant mess, instead of the clean, manageable simplicity of a single brand, tied to a single domain, with a single NAP signal.
- With rare-to-nonexistent exceptions, I consider EMDs to be missed opportunities for brand building. Imagine, if instead of being Whole Foods at WholeFoods.com, the natural foods giant had decided they needed to try to squeeze a ranking boost out of buying 400+ domains to represent the eventual number of locations they now operate. WholeFoodsDallas.com, WholeFoodsMississauga.com, etc? Such an approach would get out of hand very fast.
Even the smallest businesses should take cues from big commerce. Your brand is the magic password you want on every consumer’s lips, associated with every service you offer, in every location you open. As I recently suggested to a Moz community member, be proud to domain your flower shop as rossirovetti.com instead of hoping FloralDelivery24hoursSanFrancisco.com will boost your rankings. It’s authentic, easy to remember, looks trustworthy in the SERPs, and is ripe for memorable brand building.
What to do about it:
While I can’t speak to the minutiae of every single scenario, I’ve yet to be part of a discussion about multi-sites in the Local SEO community in which I didn’t advise consolidation. Basically, the business should choose a single, proud domain and, in most cases, 301 redirect the old sites to the main one, then work to get as many external links that pointed to the multi-sites to point to the chosen main site. This oldie but goodie from the Moz blog provides a further technical checklist from a company that saw a 40% increase in traffic after consolidating domains. I’d recommend that any business that is nervous about handling the tech aspects of consolidation in-house should hire a qualified SEO to help them through the process.
5. Creating ill-considered practitioner listings
What you’ll hear:
“We have 5 dentists at the practice, but one moved/retired last month and we don’t know what to do with the GMB listing for him.”
-or-
“Dr. Green is outranking the practice in the local results for some reason, and it’s really annoying.”
Why it’s a problem:
I’ve saved the most complex for last! Multi-practitioner listings can be a blessing, but they’re so often a bane that my position on creating them has evolved to a point where I only recommend building them in specific cases.
When Google first enabled practitioner listings (listings that represent each doctor, lawyer, dentist, or agent within a business) I saw them as a golden opportunity for a given practice to dominate local search results with its presence. However, Google’s subsequent unwillingness to simply remove practitioner duplicates, coupled with the rollout of the Possum update which filters out shared category/similar location listings, coupled with the number of instances I’ve seen in which practitioner listings end up outranking brand listings, has caused me to change my opinion of their benefits. I should also add that the business title field on practitioner listings is a hotbed of Google guideline violations — few business owners have ever read Google’s nitty gritty rules about how to name these types of listings.
In a nutshell, practitioner listings gone awry can result in a bunch of wrongly-named listings often clouded by duplicates that Google won’t remove, all competing for the same keywords. Not good!
What to do about it:
You’ll have multiple scenarios to address when offering advice about this topic.
1.) If the business is brand new, and there is no record of it on the Internet as of yet, then I would only recommend creating practitioner listings if it is necessary to point out an area of specialization. So, for example if a medical practice has 5 MDs, the listing for the practice covers that, with no added listings needed. But, if a medical practice has 5 MDs and an Otolaryngologist, it may be good marketing to give the specialist his own listing, because it has its own GMB category and won’t be competing with the practice for rankings. *However, read on to understand the challenges being undertaken any time a multi-practitioner listing is created.
2.) If the multi-practitioner business is not new, chances are very good that there are listings out there for present, past, and even deceased practitioners.
- If a partner is current, be sure you point his listing at a landing page on the practice’s website, instead of at the homepage, see if you can differentiate categories, and do your utmost to optimize the practice’s own listing — the point here is to prevent practitioners from outranking the practice. What do I mean by optimization? Be sure the practice’s GMB listing is fully filled out, you’ve got amazing photos, you’re actively earning and responding to reviews, you’re publishing a Google Post at least once a week, and your citations across the web are consistent. These things should all strengthen the listing for the practice.
- If a partner is no longer with the practice, it’s ideal to unverify the listing and ask Google to market it as moved to the practice — not to the practitioner’s new location. Sound goofy? Read Joy Hawkins’ smart explanation of this convoluted issue.
- If, sadly, a practitioner has passed away, contact Google to show them an obituary so that the listing can be removed.
- If a listing represents what is actually a solo practitioner (instead of a partner in a multi-practitioner business model) and his GMB listing is now competing with the listing for his business, you can ask Google to merge the two listings.
3.) If a business wants to create practitioner listings, and they feel up to the task of handling any ranking or situational management concerns, there is one final proviso I’d add. Google’s guidelines state that practitioners should be “directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours” in order to qualify for a GMB listing. I’ve always found this requirement rather vague. Contactable by phone? Contactable in person? Google doesn’t specify. Presumably, a real estate agent in a multi-practitioner agency might be directly contactable, but as my graphic above illustrates, we wouldn’t really expect the same public availability of a surgeon, right? Point being, it may only make marketing sense to create a practitioner listing for someone who needs to be directly available to the consumer public for the business to function. I consider this a genuine grey area in the guidelines, so think it through carefully before acting.
Giving good help
It’s genuinely an honor to advise owners and marketers who are strategizing for the success of local businesses. In our own small way, local SEO consultants live in the neighborhood Mister Rogers envisioned in which you could look for the helpers when confronted with trouble. Given the livelihoods dependent on local commerce, rescuing a company from a foundational marketing mistake is satisfying work for people who like to be “helpers,” and it carries a weight of responsibility.
I’ve worked in 3 different SEO forums over the past 10+ years, and I’d like to close with some things I’ve learned about helping:
- Learn to ask the right questions. Small nuances in business models and scenarios can necessitate completely different advice. Don’t be scared to come back with second and third rounds of follow-up queries if someone hasn’t provided sufficient detail for you to advise them well. Read all details thoroughly before replying.
- Always, always consult Google’s guidelines, and link to them in your answers. It’s absolutely amazing how few owners and marketers have ever encountered them. Local SEOs are volunteer liaisons between Google and businesses. That’s just the way things have worked out.
- Don’t say you’re sure unless you’re really sure. If a forum or client question necessitates a full audit to surface a useful answer, say so. Giving pat answers to complicated queries helps no one, and can actually hurt businesses by leaving them in limbo, losing money, for an even longer time.
- Network with colleagues when weird things come up. Ranking drops can be attributed to new Google updates, or bugs, or other factors you haven’t yet noticed but that a trusted peer may have encountered.
- Practice humility. 90% of what I know about Local SEO, I’ve learned from people coming to me with problems for which, at some point, I had to discover answers. Over time, the work put in builds up our store of ready knowledge, but we will never know it all, and that’s humbling in a very good way. Community members and clients are our teachers. Let’s be grateful for them, and treat them with respect.
- Finally, don’t stress about delivering “the bad news” when you see someone who is asking for help making a marketing mistake. In the long run, your honesty will be the best gift you could possibly have given.
Happy helping!
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