Nyagoslav - Profile

Here are some good free US directories:

Yelp.com
Citysearch.com
Superpages.com
Yellowpages.com
local.Yahoo.com
Localeze.com
Insiderpages.com
Judysbook.com
Kudzu.com
Acxiom.com
ExpressUpdateUSA.com
Angieslist.com
Merchantcircle.com
Manta.com
Brownbook.net
Yellowbot.com
Hotfrog.com
Thumbtack.com
ChamberofCommerce.com
BBB.org
WhitePages.com
Local.com
Bridgat.com
local.BOTW.org
DexKnows.com
YellowBook.com
CitySquares.com
MagicYellow.com
CityVoter.com
MojoPages.com
Tupalo.com
Truelocal.com
ServiceMagic.com
Yellowee.com
City.Ask.com
DiscoverOurTown.com
iBegin.com
ShopCity.com
Zidster.com
Foursquare.com
Jigsaw.com
Ziplocal.com
Matchpoint.com
YellowUSA.com
Locallife.com
Gomylocal.com
Showmelocal.com
Switchboard.com
Rateitall.com
jayde.com

And here are some good free UK directories:

City-Visitor.com
Qype.co.uk
Yell.com
Thomsonlocal.com
Cylex-UK.co.uk
LocalDataSearch.com
Hotfrog.co.uk
Smilelocal.com
UpMyStreet.com
Brownbook.net
Locallife.co.uk
Bview.co.uk
Touchlocal.com
Freeindex.co.uk
Bizwiki.co.uk
Accessplace.com
Ufindus.com
Local.TrueKnowledge.com
Yelp.co.uk
Tipped.co.uk
MisterWhat.co.uk
GoMy.co.uk
WhoseView.co.uk
Scoot.co.uk
MyLocalServices.co.uk

That is not perfectly true actually. The quality guidelines say:

"If you don't conduct face-to-face business at your location, you must select the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" option within your dashboard. If you don't hide your address, your listing may be removed from Google Maps."

(emphasis mine)

This means that even if you are a service-based business, generally servicing your clients at their location, as long as if someone comes to your location, you could provide customer service at particular working hours, everything should be fine.

If you have 10 or 0 pictures in your Google profile does not really make a difference to be honest. However, what does make is getting pictures from third-parties to be associated with your/your client's listing. The best ways to do that would be to geo-tag them on Panoramio and/or Flickr. Very frequently pictures from Thumbtack, Citysearch or Yahoo Local's business listings get associated with the respective Place page, too. Generally, uploading business pictures on different directories together with creating the citations is a good tactic.

However, I'm not really sure that's what googlelocalplaces meant. He seems more like an Indian freelancer

James, I believe they meant this: google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334

I think that's your main mistake. It's not really about the overall number of indexed pages on site, as about the actual structure of the website. The process is automated, so the only thing you could do would be to make sure the site structure is as straightforward as possible.

Unfortunately, I would not be able to give particular advice unless you provide a link to the website in question

Greetings,
Nyagoslav

Hey guys,

I don't want to intrude the ongoing conversation, but I just wanted to clarify the top reasons why reviews could disappear from a Place page (in order of frequency, starting with the least possible):

1. Because they were caught up by the filter algorithm as spam - if you have many reviews posted on the same day from, say, mobile devices while people are at your office/shop, Google might see this as "inappropriate" behavior and filter out the reviews; pretty similar to Yelp's filter, just not so strict

2. Because the "jumped" to another Place page - yep, this happens even more often than the filtering; usually the problem is that you have a duplicate listing on Google Maps and Google decided, for whatever reason, that this other listing is the "master" one, so it transferred some (or all) reviews there; the same case when partially merged with a totally different business's listing - Google found that some (usually address) information for your business and some other business is very similar, so again, for whatever reason, it decided that the reviews should be dedicated to the other business

3. Bug in the system - yep, the most probable of all; Google tends to lose Google reviews (funny, eh?) and while there are cases of them reappearing, that's a rather rare event of luck

Hope that was useful.

Greetings,
Nyagoslav