Google Places is a great service. No one disputes that. It allows a businesses to easily and accurately list their information on the web. But it isn’t the most straight-forward service in the world, and it’s got a few oddities and idiosyncrasies that are not immediately obvious. As such, business owners will occasionally make an error in their listing, like including a geo-modifier (that’s SEO talk for location) in the Business name or categories segment. That’s a pretty easy mistake to make, and it’s also a really quick way for Google to devalue that listing’s rank. That sort of error is a straight forward fix, though. You just log in to that Places account to make the correction, and then wait for Google to document the change. Those kinds of fixes can spring a listing right up to the top of the pack.
But what about what about more complicated problems with listings? Maybe you’ve had an SEO company or business manager create a number of listings on Google Places to try and escape negative reviews, for instance, or you’ve changed location multiple times and there are listings floating around. If Google sees multiple Places pages with similar information coupled with conflicting information (the same address with different phone number, or the same website with a different business name, etc.), they might just decide all of your listings are spam or junk, and put you out in the cold with no Google rank. This can be a bit of a pickle. Couple that with the possibility that Google has created an extra listing by scanning local directories, and you can have quite the mess to clean up.
The obvious answer is to delete all of the extraneous listings. That’s not as easy as it looks though. Deleting a Google Places listing seems straight-forward, but you can mess it up. There is a specific sequence of steps to correctly delete a listing. Annoying, I know, but here is the exact five-step process for deleting a Google places listing:
- Access your Google Places account
- Select “delete” for the listing you want to zap
- Then choose “remove this listing from Google Maps” and save the changes.
- Now you have to select the listing again and click delete again.
- Finally, click on “remove this listing from my Google Places account” and save the changes once more.
The order of these steps is critical. For instance, if you just chose “delete from Google Places account” for example, that listing will still exist, you just won’t have access to it any more. Not what we want at all. You can get it back in your account, but that’s just more hassle. This is the only way to make sure you’ve completely eliminated that undesirable listing.
We just have to hope that most of these mistakes they make will cause minimal damage, because the way this went down is not the way I ever wanted my kids to learn a lesson.