Best Practice When a Business Moves

[JoyHawkins]

I was curious to hear some feedback on Google's suggestion for when a business moves. They tell you to create a brand new listing and mark the other one as closed (even when the phone number didn't change). Are you finding this method works best? Better than just editing the existing listing?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for starting this discussion Joy!

That's really the strongly recommended method of dealing with a move by Google now, not just a suggestion. I've tried to get them to do a help doc with steps and best practices.

As I've mentioned several times, I think the reason they need it done this way is that they just can't control their scraping mechanism, so if you just edit the listing it will be a constant data fight, with the algo and bots changing it back.

There's a lot of info and good discussion in this thread:
Business Has Moved/Business is Closed Message

I've been pushing Google to change the listing label from "This Place is Permanently Closed" to location has moved. Making headway and we should see a change before too long I hope.

Google wants to represent businesses as they exist in the real world. Well in the real world businesses move AND rebrand and Google needs to get better at dealing with these changes.

But I welcome more discussion and think we need to push Google on this.

 

[Keenan Glass]

it has to do with the way the underlying data clusters work.

once a POI is established in the database, it's there forever unless it's removed. since the Places Dashboard is only one of the sources feeding the cluster, it's not enough to simply change the address in the Places Dashboard and call it a ball game.

On the surface it sounds logical enough, but apparently not how it works as Linda shared.