Business Has Moved/Business is Closed Message

[rossicone]

Hey Linda,

Do you think it is wishful thinking that Google will create a message on listings that say "This business has moved" instead of "This business is closed?" If Google refuses to remove old listings, it would more accurately display everyday life if it said moved instead of closed. Would love to know your thoughts...

Thanks,
Rachel

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Rachel,

Where is my hopping mad, hitting myself in the head smiley???

That's really a hot button for me and is one of many topics on my to-do list for a blog post. That issue is MADDENING!

Not sure if you saw this in one of my blog posts:

<strong>MOVING LOCATION - CHANGING ADDRESS </strong><strong><a href="https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/LGfmmgxd1S0">Location Moved option</a></strong> - Vanessa's advice lately for moves is to mark your old Place page as "PERMANENTLY CLOSED" and create a new Place page at the new address. One of my concerns about that is it can hurt business and make it look like you are OUT of business. PLUS old location can merge and make new location look closed. April 18 Vanessa said "Yep, we're working on better messaging for these kinds of cases. Stay tuned!". Barry Schwartz got involved in the convo. I replied "<em><strong>I gave my advice and opinion over at Barry's blog because I don't think Google would like me to post my opinion here. I think marking old locations closed is a band aid. A VERY BAD band aid for a variety of reasons, including potential merge problems.</strong></em>" See my reply and advice to Barry at his blog. <strong><a href="http://www.seroundtable.com/google-places-moving-15176.html">Moving? Google Wants You To Close Your Business!</a></strong>

I could (and probably will) write a book about how convoluted this problem is and am going to use it to again try to push Google to give us a second option like "This Place has Moved."

PLUS there is a lot more to the issue. It gets MUCH more complicated than this even.

Thing is, Google's scraping mechanism is out of control and that's why they want you to jump through these hoops, which causes NUMEROUS problems. MAJOR PROBLEMS!

Google wants you to represent your business as it is in the REAL world. Well in the real world businesses move, rebrand and merge/change names. Google just does not handle these changes right.

After the dust settles on the new forum, I'll try to blog it or post it here and get all you guys to back me up and I'll try to push Google on it again.

 

[Don Berthiaume]

Rachel... that is definitely one of Linda's hot buttons!

The fact that you should no longer claim and hope to merge old locations but rather indicate the business is closed is just ludicrous. What business would want to do that?

I'm currently in the throes of trying to sort out a client who has 4 Places pages at 4 locations (in three different towns), under various company name variations, 3-4 phone numbers and two Places dashboard accounts that I've located and a third I cannot locate.

While I would like to simply have them start from scratch, the only alternative to closing down the accounts and having "this business closed" is just not acceptable. I think everyone is looking for a better solution, the sooner the better.

Yes Linda, I'm meeting with them tomorrow and hope to get the go ahead

 

[rossicone]

Hi Linda and Don

Thanks for the links to the forums/blogs! It really makes no sense that Google would want an opened business to mark their listing as closed, but it is great to see that Vanessa has acknowledged the situation and is "working" on a fix...whenever that happens!

Don-- good to know that there are a ton of businesses in the same situation. It can be quite the mess and extremely frustrating cleaning all the inaccurate listings/citations up! I cross my fingers that my clients don't move, change their phone number, or business name because it creates so many problems! But in the real world that is not realistic. Come on Google!

Linda-- "After the dust settles on the new forum, I'll try to blog it or post it here and get all you guys to back me up and I'll try to push Google on it again." Whenever this happens, I have your back! I will do anything to help push for Google to fix this because not only will it help my clients, but it will make my life much easier Hopefully we can ban together in numbers and show Google this is a huge issue!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Rachel... that is definitely one of Linda's hot buttons!

Yes Linda, I'm meeting with them tomorrow and hope to get the go ahead

Go get 'em Don. Good Luck!

Thanks Rachel, will try to remember and post back on this thread when I get the MOVE blog post done.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Exciting news guys. Finally making a little progress with Google on this front.

Stay tuned and after I get the official word and make sure I can share it, will be doing a blog post and will try to remember to link to the news in this thread.

 

[rossicone]

Wahoo!! Thanks for all that you do for us local specialists!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Well it's not quite the IDEAL solution we all want, but it's a compromise and much better than the way it is now.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Linda - I've read from a Top Contributor, a Google Employee, and a Map Maker guy, that it's always best to create a new listing when a client moves and to mark the old one as closed.

Our policy has been to NEVER do this for many reasons, including the ones that you mentioned earlier.

Has your stance changed at all on this? I know you have strong feelings about this. So do I, but I keep reading that creating a new listing and marking the old one is the way to go now.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Yes it's Google's current best practice for moving.

I'm still conflicted about it and there are tons of pro/cons both ways.
With the new "closed" messaging it will be a LITTLE bit better.

AND I just emailed several G managers about this issue today and requested they also do a detailed help doc about best practice for moves. So we'll see if they will do that for us. Right now there are just a few subtle comments in the G forum from Vanessa and no real official guidelines.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

You really do rock, Linda!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Forgot to come back to say they ARE actively working on something and we've been discussing some great options. That's all I can say for now and no ETA on solutions.

 

[Linda Buquet]

YEA! Progress made!!! Read the news here:

Yea! PERMANENTLY CLOSED - Moved Business - Google Update

 

[rossicone]

Wahoo!!! I can't believe the day is finally here! Thanks for the big push to get this fixed!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Yep, it was a long time coming. The bigger the company, the harder and slower change happens it seems. But gotta be happy when it finally does happen!