Why Is This Website Not Showing Up In The Pack?

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Hair Salon St. Petersburg - Salon 8410

Local hair salon in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Target kw = "hair salon st. petersburg" and similar

https://plus.google.com/115017888801244848949/about?gl=us&hl=en

Only issue I see is the description in the listing mentioning St. Pete twice.

A little history..they 'used' to show up in the listings, but dropped out, and haven't shown back up in a few months. Current rank is 2nd page organic.

Thanks for helping if you can!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Probably not the main culprit, but it's probably worth noting that there appear to be a couple categories in your dash that don't meet Google's "is not does" guideline.

Hair Color
Hair Cuts

 

[Linda Buquet]

Colan is right about the cats, although I agree and I don't normally see a penalty for that rule.

Hair Salon St. Petersburg - Salon 8410

Only issue I see is the description in the listing mentioning St. Pete twice.

It also repeats State from NAP and has "hair salon", the main KW twice. I've def seen this cause a ranking penalty and shortly after it's cleaned up the listing pops.

St Petersburg, Florida's premier boutique hair salon for women - Hair straightening & coloring specialist, also specializing in modern hair styles, cuts, highlighting, waxing - St. Pete hair salon

I'd clean out everything I highlighted red and come up with another way to say those things. Also needs to be complete sentence. It ends with DASH KEYWORD STRING. This whole description I think could be seen by the algo as spammy. It's not as bad as some, but bad enough for a ranking penalty I believe.

The site is not as well optimized as it could be either. Only ranks 12 in PURE organic. So we have a case of a fairly competitive KW and the listing is not ranking well in maps OR in organic, so it's not going to make the 1st page pack.

Don't have time for a deep dive. There could be other issues. That's all I see with a quick glance.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

I also wonder if the business title in all caps triggered a filter....

I see that you are trying to correct that in Map Maker. I assume you have it without all caps in your dashboard?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Good catch Colan, I meant to mention that too. Not sure the name in caps by itself would normally be a problem. I mean more than 3 caps can trip a filter but it usually shows up in dash as pending review from what I've seen.

But if you think like the algo, trained to combat spam, what do the 3rd world spammers do?

Name: BEST Salon in Dallas! And KW repetition spam. So the name plus description combined could possibly be sending a negative signal.

Plus they are a little far north and barely are inside the map radius for hair salon st. petersburg so it could be partly location, which isn't a death sentence just means you really have to work harder on several fronts.

 

[davejones]

Couple of things I noticed:

1. URL on Google + Local page is

http://salon8410.com

but should be

http://www.salon8410.com

2. Getting a 404 error when loading page for file http://www.salon8410.com/wp-content/themes/salon-8410/styles/default.css

3. I would hide my Piwik Analytics server by following this doc - http://piwik.org/faq/how-to/#faq_132

Not sure if any of these would cause issues with rankings though.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Couple of things I noticed:

1. URL on Google + Local page is

http://salon8410.com

but should be

http://www.salon8410.com

Hey Dave, good troubleshooting!

That's something I always check when I do a deep dive for consulting clients, but don't always remember to check here when just giving quick advice.

I'm not sure it impacts ranking directly but think it's important.

Google HATES redirects. Sometimes redirects are sneaky or spammy. In cases where the no www redirects to www, (or vice versa) it's not sneaky BUT essentially you are linking to the wrong page - so it needs to redirect to resolve. So it's just not the best, most direct route to the site.

Note to all: When you check a page it's easy to miss because root.com will show whether it's entered with or without the www. You can mouse over to see it, but I also always click through to be sure which page it actually lands on. For example, I might see www on the G+ L page and assume that's correct, but then click over to find that the site uses http with NO www,