How to Tackle Google Places Merged Listings

Hi Everybody,
With the rise of local search engine results in Google's search results there have been a plethora of issues relating to merged or duplicate listings. There is nothing worse than realizing after you have spent an hour updating your listing that Google already had one tucked away, a bland very basic listing that may even have the wrong details on it. So how do you go about ensuring people are ringing the right location with the right phone number?

Google creates places listings by trawling the web for information on your business, amalgamates what it finds and even merges some information to create a single listing. The flaw here is that your business details may be listed in different ways or inaccurately on different sites. Google themselves state that "Sometimes, though, it's tough for us to recognize two legitimate businesses with lots of similar information as separate establishments." So your default listing may contain inaccurate information.

Your first port of call should be to search for and claim your default listing and use this instead of starting another, fresh listing. This should keep duplicate listing issues to a minimum and allow you to step wide of merged listing issues. However, more and more businesses are finding that, where they own two or more locations, the listing information is becoming automatically merged. Hotels are a perfect example, where two or more of the same hotel chain exists in one city, listings are cannibalizing each others information creating two listings of which neither is correct. Photos of one hotel often appear alongside the phone number and address of another. This can confuse travelers looking to book but more over it can lead to lost business for the owners.

So how can you tackle these issues?

1. Check all existing Google Places listings before diving in and creating a new one. If one exists, claim it. If more than one exists, claim one and then close all duplicates.

2. Ensure all instances (within your control) of your business information are up to date and correct on those sites known to be reference points for Google such as yell.com

3. Ensure all locations have a unique address, telephone number and email address.

4. Check the location marker on the map, is it in the correct location? If not, move it. You can use a KML sitemap to create the exact longitude and latitude if necessary.

Unfortunately, sometime you just have to contact Google and hope that they will sort the issue out, but I would recommend you try the above points first as this can a be a lengthy and frustrating route.