Best practice to move SAB to the new legal address and keep the reviews?

[Adnan Dz.]

Hi everyone,

I really appreciate being part of this community.

I originally posted this question in the Google Help Community but haven’t received any replies yet. I also read this article which was extremely helpful, but I’m still occasionally struggling with the execution in practice.

We’re trying to move Service Area Businesses (SABs) to their new, official addresses while retaining their reviews. The consistent issue we run into is that, even when we create a new listing at the new official address, verify it, and ask support to transfer reviews, Google often flags the new listing as a “Duplicate” rather than recognizing it as a relocation. Is it more difficult if the official address is in the same city?

So, my questions are:

• Is there a proven step-by-step workflow for moving an SAB without losing reviews?
• How should we actually reach out to support (via email?) and word the request to support so they treat it as a relocation rather than a duplicate?
• If a new listing is required, what’s the best practice around account ownership, matching details, etc., to minimize problems?

Could anyone share the exact workflow or language that worked? Thank you very much!

 

[JoyHawkins]

Google flagging it as a duplicate is what should happen. There is no downside to this. So if you follow the steps in that article you should be good.

There is only one path these days to support which is here: https://support.google.com/business/gethelp

You'd want both listings in the same accounts.

I've seen the method in my article used many times without issues with losing reviews.

 

[Adnan Dz.]

Thanks so much for your quick response - I really appreciate it. Apologies for this long message.

I’m hoping you can help me understand what happened in our specific case. We followed the recommended workflow: created a new listing at the correct, legitimate address and verified it. That new profile had no reviews, while the old one (not at the official address) did.

When we contacted support, they told us the profiles were “merged.” The issue isn’t that one profile was marked as a duplicate - that part makes sense - but they marked the new, verified profile as the duplicate and kept the old profile active. If support is actually updating the address on the old profile in the backend, that would be fine, but from what I can tell they aren’t doing that.

Our goal was to make the new, verified listing the primary one with the reviews transferred. Is this outcome something you’ve seen before? Is it a problem that they are in the same city (old GBP and the new one, at the official address)?

I keep getting pushback from the L1 agents, who say they already escalated it to a “specialist”. In one case, Google even marked the new profile as duplicate and then triggered reverification (I can add the address, and it goes to video verification) for the old profile (both were verified before we contacted support).

Thanks again for your insight and guidance - it’s very helpful.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Wow, sounds like they screwed it up. This definitely can happen, but it's reversible so you should just ask them to do that. I would say you'll be waiting for about a week tops. If it's taking longer than that, let me know.

 

[Adnan Dz.]

Thank you very much! It's a huge relief to know we weren't doing something wrong and that this is reversible.

I'll give it a few more days to get it sorted and will reply back here with an update.

Thanks so much for your help!